


We Three Sith

by Defira



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Multi, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 04:23:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6939502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Sith Lord Zash has had a vision that has hinted at greatness and power for her, if only she were to take a slave as her newest apprentice. Her vision, however, was decidedly unclear on how she was to determine which applicant held the most potential to see her through to glory. </p><p>Three young slaves, all of whom have endured horrors beyond imagining, have arrived on Korriban at the same time. What better way to stack the odds in her favour than for Zash to gamble on three at once?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sparks

Her mother taught her how to sever herself from the Force. 

She didn’t remember it. It was one of those early things a parent teaches a child, like how to walk or talk, how to eat without choking or making a mess, how to bathe and discreetly relieve oneself. As far as she knew, she could have learnt it first, a lesson whispered frantically and hushed by her mother when she wailed and fussed at the discomfort. She just simply knew how to cut herself away from the Force in the same manner that she knew how to breathe- instinctive, really. 

“You must never let anyone know, my darling Bejah,” her mother had said whenever she’d queried it, smoothly her hair away her face with hands that shook slightly. She was never sure if it was exhaustion from the work that made her tremble, or whether it was fear. “If they know how bright you shine, they will try to kill the light within you. Never let them see it, my darling.”

Her mother never said who _They_ were, or why they might have wanted to hurt her. All she knew was that it ached like a bad tummy ache most days, enough to make her tired and miserable. Mother of course had shown her how to unlock it again- for emergencies, she said- and sometimes when it was late at night and the rest of the workers were asleep, she would peek at the secret heart of herself. It was always _wonderful_ \- like being able to see after living her life in blindness, or regaining a limb after tragically losing it. But mother said it was dangerous, and that _They_ would hurt her for it, so she kept it secret. 

She did wonder sometimes how many of the other workers might be the same as them, how many might be hiding secret parts of themselves under lock and key lest someone discover it. Mother said, when she asked, that it had always been this way- that she had learned from her mother, who had learned it from her father, who had learned it from his father and so on; how far back their secret went, she could not say, only that it was necessary.

_They_ would find them, if they revealed themselves, and that would not do. And so they hid. 

Sometimes, if mother was not too tired after the labours of the day, while she and Bejah were curled up together in the tiny bunk they shared in the workers quarters, she would whisper her stories. Not too loud, of course, because the other workers would hiss at them to hush, or mother would grow fearful of someone listening in and reporting back to _Them_. But she told her stories of the Force, the thing inside her that she needed to keep secret, and she told her of great adventures and battles and magic. 

Warriors who could call the sky down to fight at their side, and great ships that sailed between the stars. Sorcerers who could heal people just with a touch, or who could cloak themselves in shadow to walk undetected. Wonderful, terrible stories, of far off lands a million lifetimes away from the dank corridors of the factory that was home. Sometimes she liked to imagine what such places must be like, but the most water she had ever seen in her life was the rancid puddles in the decontamination sector, where they scrubbed and scoured at any equipment that might be considered salvageable. Salvageable for what, she did not know or understand, but she knew that it was very bad indeed to be assigned duties in decontamination. So how could she imagine what an ocean was, when her mother described them in her stories, when such a concept was beyond her? What did it mean to say ‘ _water that stretched to the horizon_ ’ when she didn’t really understand what a horizon was? What was a flower, that her mother would describe them so sweetly and with such longing?

To the best of her knowledge, her mother had been born into slavery, just as she had. But maybe her mother had not been born in the factory; maybe her mother had seen beyond the walls and had seen these _oceans_ she spoke of, or these flowers. 

Maybe mother had used her gift, and _They_ had trapped her in here as punishment, away from the oceans and the flowers. Mother often cried late at night, and sometimes she crawled into her arms and hugged her, and other times she pretended to sleep instead. Sometimes it was best not to draw attention, in case one of the other slaves said something to the boss men.

It was not a very good idea to get the attention of the boss men. Bejah wondered a lot if the boss men were _Them_ that mother was so afraid of. 

She never got to ask. 

When she was nine, the alarm began to blare, a warning that something had gone wrong on one of the assembly lines. It went off fairly regularly, honestly- slaves were cheaper than safe equipment, after all, and the sound of the alarm meant it was time to pray uneasily to whatever gods or spirits you hoped were listening that you wouldn’t be docked food from the evening meal as a penalty for the lost working time. Bejah, working down in the junk heaps where she could scramble over the shifting mounds of scrap like a kowakian monkey-lizard to find the best salvage, had wiped the sweat from her face with greasy hands when she’d heard someone screaming her name. 

Scampering down the stacks and onto the floor, she found Keena in tears- she was nice enough, she had two toddlers who Bejah played with sometimes when she wasn’t too tired, but Keena wasn’t above prattling to the boss men if she thought it'd get her babies better food. Bejah knew better than to trust her.

“Bejah!” she screamed, wringing her hands together in a panic. “Bejah, come quick!”

She hoped no one was stuck in the machines again- she was small enough that the boss men liked to have her scramble down inside the shafts sometimes, to try and kick free the torn off limbs or chunks of flesh so that the gears could turn again. 

And then Keena said the worst thing she could ever have said, the thing that turned Bejah’s life upside down.

“It’s your mother!”

She didn’t remember running through the halls, and she didn’t remember screaming and shrieking as she ran, pushing full grown adults out of her way. She didn’t remember the crowd gathered around the accident except that they were in the way, nor did she remember how there were still burning fragments of metal scattered on the ground where the boiler had exploded. 

There were a dozen bodies on the ground, all of whom would be replaced in a few days so as not to disrupt productivity. But all she cared about was her mother, her flesh burned and raw, her clothing black and crumbling. The ground had been hot beneath her hands, the puddles almost burning as she knelt beside her mother, the world slowing to a halt around them. 

With her one good hand, her mother had reached for her, her smile a rictus grin of pain and horror. There were tears leaking from her remaining eye, and Bejah thought she’d never looked more beautiful. 

“My beautiful girl,” her mother had rasped, and her hand had been so cold where it has touched her cheek. It was so hot in the room, the duracrete burning her knees and the steam making her skin clammy and her heart pounding wildly behind her ribs until she felt light-headed- but her mother was cold. 

“I can save you,” she’d said, shaking so badly the words had been mere stutters. “I can fix this.”

She’d reached for the secret part of her- she’d reached to unlock the Force, because mother’s stories had said that the sorcerers could heal with a touch, and maybe she could too, maybe this was what she’d been given her gift for in the first place- but her mother had put a hand over her mouth. 

“It’s too late for me, my darling.” Her breath had rattled in her chest while her raw, bloodied face had bled onto the duracrete floor. “Keep it secret, never let them find you.”

When she’d died a few moments later, Bejah had _felt_ it, even without the Force to show her. 

And when she’d died, Bejah felt part of her die with her.

______

She was good with her hands. 

The boss men could grudgingly accept that about her- she had a knack for getting to the heart of a problem without fail, as if she could speak to the machines and nod solemnly and pinpoint their complaints without blinking. 

When she’d gotten too big for the scrap heaps, not light enough on her feet to traverse the surface of the stacks without sending them crashing to the ground, she’d been moved to the furnaces instead. Anything considered worthless scrap got sent down here, to be smelted down into metal sheets and reused, but she found more than enough junk on the conveyer belts that she could miraculously get working again that she occasionally got praised for it.

Course that meant that the other workers slowly grew to resent her, because every piece of salvageable tech she found was a piece that someone else has missed on the sorting floor, and every time someone missed a piece of salvageable tech, that cost the boss men money. So every time Bejah found something, it meant that someone else wasn’t doing their job right.

And a lot of people got punished for that sort of thing. 

She took to sleeping down in the furnace too, away from the workers quarters, because she wasn’t so interested in finding out how far their anger with her stretched. People got themselves dead for next to no reasons in the halls of the factory, and resentments could simmer for a long, long time before they burst out in a deadly manner. 

The furnace room was nice enough, once you got used to the heat. It was mostly droids doing the labour, prodding the contents of the conveyer belts into the vats to be melted down; droids could withstand much hotter temperatures than mortal flesh, and weren’t so bothered by the occasional spark or glob of molten slag that would kill or incapacitate a living worker. She found them to be decent company, for the most part- they didn’t glare sullenly at her when she walked past, or stare with that unpleasant hunger that made her sleep with a carefully crafted stun stick tucked beneath her pillow. The parts she’d salvaged to build it would probably get her in a world of trouble for stealing, but she would rather risk shifts without meal packets or a week in the isolation cell than find herself defenceless is the face of that skin-crawling hunger on the faces of the other slaves.

Seeing it on the faces of the boss men was worse, because while it wasn’t impossible to off one of them, it wasn’t something she wanted to put to the test- she’d heard all the stories about Zee’nayla, the twi’lek in another part of the factory who had killed a boss man for touching her, and how they’d never found his body. They hadn’t been able to prove she’d done it, even though everyone seemed to take it as fact that she had. Bejah wondered what kind of woman she was, whether she was brave and fierce and fearless. She liked to imagine the boss men cowered when they had to walk past her, and she fantasised about what that would be like- not having to live in fear, glancing over her shoulder every few minutes.

She had it all planned out, of course. There weren’t no cameras down here, down where the droids worked mostly, so she could knock them on the head with her stun stick and then shove them into one of the furnaces. South Seven Four had a broken panel beside the grate, the warped metal misshapen by the heat enough to slowly undermine the hinge; she’d been working it loose in whatever free minutes she could manage for the last few months now, trying to prise the massive grate free so that she could have unhindered access to the furnace. 

Of course, the thought had occurred to her that maybe she could use her powers to help, but she couldn’t let _Them_ find her. She’d made a promise to her mother, she’d let her mother _die_ as a part of that promise, and she couldn’t break that trust. If _They_ were terrifying enough to frighten her mother so much that death was preferable to being found, she wasn’t sure she wanted to face them alone. 

So she lived to be as small as she could, always glancing over her shoulder as she worked, always sleeping with one hand on the stun stick under the ragged old shirt stuffed with foam insulation she’d stolen from inside a wall panel- she used it as a pillow, and as long as she didn’t breathe in the corrosive dust that crumbled off the foam, it was fine. 

When she was fifteen, she found the chassis of an outdated model of gonk droid on the piles waiting to be processed on the conveyer belts. It was filthy, and the metal heavily corroded in places- obviously the frame itself still held a decent amount of salvageable desh once it was melted down, hence why it was scheduled for scrap. 

There was an alphanumerical sequence stamped on the side, either a model number or an indication of the manufacturer- SP-R0. She knew her numbers well enough, but she had trouble with her letters, so it took her awhile to puzzle out what it said under the rust. She hadn’t seen that particular chassis style before, and it was strangely small for a power droid; couldn’t be that practical, not for long term use. Probably why it was here, the inside stripped of all working parts and wiring, leaving only the hollow shell; anything useful would have been cut out on the factory floors above her. 

Something about it tugged at her, this sad little empty droid with no more soul and no more brain, stripped and gutted and discarded; too small to be useful or sensible for the very task it had been designed for. She found herself pulling it off the assembly line, avoiding the irritable poke of one of the droids on duty that garbled broken binary at her before settling back into its station nearer to the smelters. 

Building a droid from pieces of stolen scrap was a much bigger crime than building a stun stick- it needed at the very least a rudimentary processor, not something she was likely to find this late in the salvage chain. She needed a power source, and a motor to run the pistons in the legs- oh, and she’d need to find pistons, and probably some kind of vocaliser. She might even need to find a way to access a terminal so she could write up some basic code, because she couldn't just stuff all the parts in and hope the suddenly conscious droid knew what to do with sentience.

Assuming she could do it, of course. 

She named it Spiro, and she hid it down near South Seven Four, creeping out of bed to work on it on the nights when she had a piece she thought might fix a new problem. 

Putting the physical pieces together wasn’t so bad- it was like a puzzle, trying to see what slotted together where, and she was patient. Over the coming months she slowly and studiously salvaged what she could without rousing suspicion, sitting up late into the night trying to fit parts from a dozen different droids together to build herself a friend. The gyroscopic stabiliser was her first treasured find, the crushed shell of a loading droid trapped between two larger sheets of rusted durasteel providing the bounty; she would have missed it entirely if the flickering light from the furnaces hadn’t caught on a fault in the first sheet, betraying the fact that something was caught between them, warping the shape of the metal. Prising them apart had been fantastically hard, but the reward- a slightly dented but otherwise functional stabiliser- had been well worth it. 

Spiro could stand without falling, and that in itself made it feel more real already. 

She was going to have something entirely her own, something that she had crafted with her own two hands. A _friend_. 

It made the deep ache in her belly that was the Force wanting to be heard a little easier to manage. She had things to distract her. She would have a friend.

She didn’t need the Force, and _They_ would never find her. 

______

She shouldn’t have touched South Seven Four. 

Over the course of years she had slowly tampered with it more and more, breaking the door fully so she could dispose of the scraps that would expose her tinkering, using the heat to jury rig a handmade welding iron so that she could work on Spiro. Nobody came to inspect the furnaces for quality assurance, nobody came down at all unless they were checking on broken tech or suspiciously slow production lines; at some point in the last two years it had become an unspoken expectation that she would see to the maintenance of the droids, and she’d learned quickly that no one was interested in her actually asking for new parts and maintenance gear. They just expected her to keep things running with what she had on hand, just like they never fixed the broken boilers or the filthy chemical washers- cheaper to buy another slave or droid than spend precious production time trying to keep them healthy or in good repair. 

It was how she got a processor for Spiro in the end- there was a labour droid that was held together with nothing more than luck and wire, and in the end the luck ran out. 

_Fell in the smelters, boss sir_ , she’d said, trying not to mumble or cringe as she stared at their boots. _Was too far away to stop it, boss sir. Salvaged what I could, boss sir._

It was a lie, of course, and she’d prayed with everything in her that they’d buy it. The droid had collapsed, true, the motivator burning out and the damn thing collapsing in a puddle on the floor- but it hadn’t been anywhere near the smelter when it had broken. She’d stripped it of what parts she was still missing, including the processor, and then she’d dragged it to the smelting tanks for good measure, just to melt the top half. So that no one would be able to find evidence of her thieving. 

The boss men were angry about the contamination, impurities in the metal making it harder to sell on to whoever it was on the outside world buying their scrap sheets. But no one had looked too closely at the droid, and in the end, she had a working processor ready to go into her nearly functional gonk droid. 

Her hands were shaking as she installed it, fumbling with the last few connective ports as she prayed that she’d wired it up properly. She’d taken a good look inside the head of the few dead droids who’d made it down here, and the few times she’d had to repair the assembly line droids, she’d sat and tried to memorise what went where and what it was all supposed to look like. 

Maybe it was the secret part of her that helped, the Force, pushing up through her hands even though she tried to hide it. Maybe it knew how bad she needed a friend, and wishing hard enough made it want to be fact instead of fantasy. Maybe she was just good with her hands and some secret magic had nothing to do with it. 

But the row of lights slowly illuminated when she hit the power switch, the motor slowly whirring to life and the pistons raising the ugly box off of the ground on rudimentary legs. She held her breath, her fingers stinging from the delicate work with the screws and the wires; the movement so far was mechanical, nothing to suggest any sort of sentience. 

That was something to be proud of, at least, even if she hadn’t done it right. She’d still built a droid from nothing, and that was something.

It wasn’t a friend, but it was something. 

But then the box jerked slightly, the same way she did sometimes when she was half asleep and thought she’d heard a noise; she squeaked in alarm and fell back onto her bottom, and the little box responded in kind. A shrill beep emitted from the vocaliser, and the awkward feet tried to scramble backwards, as if in a panic. 

_It was awake._

“Shh, shh!” She fumbled back onto her knees, trying to grab for it. “It’s alright! I’m a friend!” 

The droid tried to swing towards her voice and overbalanced, promptly toppling over onto its side. For a moment, the boxy legs kicked futilely as it attempted to flee, before it seemed to realise it was not actually in contact with the ground and let out a plaintive beep. 

Bejah bit her lip, trying not to laugh. “It’s okay,” she said quietly, reaching forward and carefully righting it again, “I’m a friend. I guess your stabiliser was a little more dented than I thought, huh?” 

Another pitiful beep, and then it seemed to be shuffling its feet almost shyly. 

“You can understand me?” Another beep that appeared to be in the affirmative, and she felt a rush of relief. “I’m Bejah. I’m going to take care of you. That’s okay?”

It burbled a string of beeps, far too quickly for her to follow along, and she held a hand up. “Woah, woah, easy. I’m still learning.” It beeped again, slower this time. “I think your name is Spiro.”

A questioning beep. 

“No, you don’t need to do anything, I just, um...” She swallowed, very abruptly overwhelmed with emotion. She hadn’t really had anyone to talk to, really honestly talk to, since her mother had died a decade ago. “Would you like to be my friend?” 

Spiro followed her about like a faithful pet as she went about cleaning up the last scraps and evidence of her tinkering. South Seven Four rumbled as she tossed the filthy rag she’d used to wrap a cut on her arm into the flames, and there’d been some pressure in one of the pipes as she closed the broken panel again. She released one of the standby valves, channelling the pressure through to another part of the factory, and the gauge settled back to a more acceptable level. 

She didn’t think anything else of it. 

Something woke her later that week, something that prickled along the back of her neck the same way it did when someone was staring at her all hungry. It was the same thing she felt when she knew there was danger, when something weren’t what it was supposed to be, and she sat up abruptly in her nest of filthy scraps of fabric, glancing around in the flickering lighting of the room. Spiro was huddled down by her feet, unmoving, and she didn’t know whether it was just in reserve power mode, or whether it was huddled in fear.

Did droids have the same sixth sense that mortals did, that inkling of danger? 

Blinking against the red glow of the furnaces, trying to peer into the moving shadows around the room, she patted the space closer to her knee. “Spiro,” she whispered, “come here.” 

The droid beeped quietly at her.

“It’s alright,” she whispered, licking her lips nervously. “Come closer.” 

Spiro straightened to its full height, one chunky little leg extending as it went to step forward- and then it promptly fell backwards onto its back as the rumbling began. 

Bejah lurched upright in her filthy nest, her stomach seething in terror as the building around her began to shake; from somewhere not too far away, she could hear the pained whine of metal slowly buckling under pressure, the hiss and huff of pipes bursting. Dust began to rattle down from the ceiling, and the piles of junk began to vibrate off of the conveyer belts. Spiro beeped hysterically, and Bejah threw herself forward onto her hands and knees, crawling across to it and tucking the gonk droid against her chest. 

“It’s alright,” she said, shouting to be heard over the escalating noise. “It’s-”

The world exploded. 

South Seven Four had been broken for years now, but Bejah’s furtive attempts to use it for her own projects had exacerbated the issues. The scrap that she’d thrown into the furnace to hide her activities had mostly burned away, as intended, but some of it had not- some of it had gotten wedged in an outlet pipe, slowly accumulating ash and dirt until the entire valve was blocked, and the pressure had nowhere to go. South Seven Four had been slowly deteriorating, building pressure over days and weeks until it was primed to explode like an enormous, multi-storey bomb.

It was like being trapped in one of the sorting machines, being thrown around and battered from all sides at once; there was heat and shrapnel and more heat and she wasn’t ready to die, not like this, not like this, and not poor little Spiro-

Her mother had chosen death instead of letting _Them_ find her, but Bejah was not that strong. The Force roared to life within her at her panicked call, and it was pushing out of her, wrapping around her and cushioning her against the wall of death that would have slammed her into pieces. 

Around her, the factory collapsed, the duracrete floors groaning and shrieking as the explosion ripped through the hallways; other furnaces followed in the wake of the first, the pressure valves useless against such immense stress on the frames. Tonnes of rock and metal cascaded down on top of her, the noise enough to rattle her teeth almost out of her skull; the heat seared at her, enough that she could feel her skin growing tight with the burn, and through it all she was sobbing and screaming, hands thrown out as she tried to keep the bubble of safety around herself, as she tried to project the worst of the devastation away from her. 

It felt like it took an eternity, but eventually the rumbling stopped. 

Sobbing, Bejah was hunched over beneath a giant slab of twisted metal and duracrete, the metal frames jabbing out of the broken rock and so close to having impaled her that she could feel them pressing against her stomach as she wheezed for breath. There were burning piles of rubble nearby, and the air was grey with dust; down by her feet, Spiro was lying on its side, a dazed, high-pitched beep emitting from its vocaliser. 

And around her, a few inches from her skin in every direction, was a golden glow that safely encased both her and Spiro. She had no idea what it was, but she knew without a trace of hesitation that she had made it, and that she had used the Force to do it. 

The grey dust continued to rain down softly around her, like a bizarre mist, and when she finally worked out how to drop the barrier around her, her skin was coated in seconds, the dust clinging to the sweat on her. She staggered slightly, the exhaustion and the shock setting in now that the worst of it was over, and she was crying and panting as she tried to crouch to help Spiro back to its feet. 

She collapsed.

______

When she woke up, aching and dizzy, she was not surrounded by the ruins of the factory. Every single part of her throbbed in accord, her head thick and pounding hard enough to make her whimper as she tried to sit up. 

Someone said something in a language she did not recognise, and she froze. They repeated the sounds, and she hesitantly opened her eyes, trying not to let panic overwhelm her as she did so. 

She was in one of the blank metal rooms she recognised as similar to the isolation cells- it was bigger than the one she’d been confined in once, which had been little more than a box, so wherever she was, she hadn’t gone far from the factory. Maybe the whole thing wasn’t destroyed, and she was just in another wing? If that was the case, this was the furthest she’d ever travelled in her life. 

She was lying on the floor, still covered in dust and a few sticky places that seemed to be old blood; she couldn’t tell how long she’d been lying unconscious, but it had to be at least a few hours if her wounds had stopped bleeding. Maybe a day? 

The words were spat at her again, irritated and short-tempered, and she looked up. There were two people in the room with her, one a blue skinned chagrian with a broken horn who she recognised as one of the boss men, and the other... 

Strikingly pale skin, sickly looking to Bejah’s eyes, with dark lines forking out around the woman’s yellow eyes like a spider web. Her hair was just as pale, pulled up around her head in an intricate style that seemed to defy the laws of physics in how it stayed elevated. She was draped in the most extraordinary fabrics that Bejah had ever seen in her life, in colours she’d never even seen before.

She knew, without needing to ask, that this woman was one of _Them_. 

They had found her. 

“You only speak Huttese?” she asked disdainfully, finally saying something that Bejah could understand. 

She nodded rapidly, hugging her arms to herself as she tried to shrink down as far into the ground as she could. 

The woman made a noise of disgust, and turned back to the boss man; she said something harsh, and very clearly angry, and he cringed away from her, cowering even more than Bejah was. He said something awkwardly in the same language, simpering and cloying, and she barked a response at him. 

“You will need to learn a more civilized tongue,” the woman said abruptly, turning back to her. “No sith speaks with the language of worms.” 

The... what? What was a sith? 

“The droid you were found with shows no shielding capability,” she continued, not pausing for explanations. “How did you survive the explosion?” 

Bejah winced, lowering her head further. “I, um-”

“Do not stammer, it is unbecoming of you and a waste of my time.”

“I did it myself,” Bejah whispered, the words falling out of her in a rush. 

“You did what? Speak up, girl, you are entirely too irritating right now, grovelling like you are.”

“I made the shield,” she said, her voice only marginally louder as she braced herself miserably. “I can- I made it. With the Force.”

The woman was silent for a moment, the room all but pulsing with tension. “So you are not entirely ignorant,” she mused, the curiosity in her tone sending a shudder of revulsion along her spine. “Who taught you of the Force?”

“My mother.”

“She was a sith?”

“She- she was a slave,” she said awkwardly, still not sure what a sith was but increasingly certain she did not like it. 

“Did she teach you to do-” The woman made another noise of disgust, enough for Bejah to glance up to see her gesturing towards her. “-this?”

Bejah blinked, frozen in fear and confusion. 

The temperature very abruptly dropped in the room, and Bejah cried out softly at the shock. “Don't play ignorant with me, girl,” the woman said softly. “You are a Void in the Force, an absence- a subtle one, mind, but I know that you have done it. Did your mother teach you this?”

“Yes,” she whispered, trying her hardest not to rock back and forth weeping in fear. 

“Undo it. Now.”

Startled, Bejah actually looked up at her, finding bright yellow eyes watching her far too eagerly. 

“Show me your powers, girl. Hurry up.”

There was nothing else for it. If she didn’t show her, she would kill her, that much was obvious. Trying to ignore the misery in her gut that whispered to her that she was betraying her mother’s memory, she bit her lip to keep from crying as she reached down inside of herself and unlocked the place where she hid her connection to the Force. 

It had been so long since she’d done it deliberately, so long since she’d had the chance to enjoy the wonder of it all; she shuddered with unbridled relief as it washed through her like a rejuvenating wave, her soul soaking it up desperately like she lunged for food after a day without rations. She might have made a noise, a soft moan of satisfaction, but she was too distracted to be sure. 

“ _Yes_ ,” the woman said, the greed and the eagerness in her voice jarring after the bliss of her reconnection to the Force. “Yes, girl, magnificent. You have a gift.” 

The way she said it, overeager and calculating and hungry, made Bejah want to shrink down again, hide the light away from her. _They will try to kill the light within you_ , her mother had said. Feeling the queasiness she experienced just from being in this woman’s presence, she understood now that her mother hadn’t necessarily meant They would kill her. 

The woman wanted her to be like her, and it repulsed her. 

“She will come with me,” the woman said, barely glancing in the direction of the boss man. He, in response, made a half-hearted attempt at protest.

“She blew up half the damn factory, we lost hundreds of slaves and droids.” Bejah felt the bottom fall out of her stomach- it hadn’t occurred to her before now that people would have died in the explosion. People were dead. Others would be injured. 

“As I understand it, your poor workplace practices were responsible for the accident,” the woman said disdainfully. “All Force-sensitive citizens are required to serve on Korriban for the Emperor’s glory- you should be gracious that I do not kill you for hiding one of the Emperor’s chosen from us in the first place.”

Korriban? Emperor? What was going on? 

“We demand compensation-”

What happened next would stick in Bejah’s memory for all time. The boss man had stabbed a finger angrily in the direction of the woman, who had stared at him with such cold disdain that even Bejah had shrunk away from it. Her own hand had snapped out in retaliation, her fingers curling to make a pinching gesture, and the boss man had abruptly started choking. 

His hands went up to his throat, clawing frantically at an unseen hand, and as Bejah watched in horrified silence, his feet had slowly lifted from the floor, his toes scrabbling desperately for purchase on the ground. The woman’s face was calm, but her eyes were glowing red, and Bejah had never seen anything more terrifying in her life. 

The choking sounds grew worse, and there was spittle and foam hanging from the boss man’s mouth as he writhed against the invisible bonds; his face was slowly turning purple, his eyes bulging in his head, and Bejah found herself silently weeping as she stared. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen folk die before, it happened a lot in the factory, and of course she’d seen her mother die all those years ago, but this was, this was...

This was _evil_. 

Eventually the jerking and the spasms stopped, and the choking, wheezing noises died away. The woman lowered her arm, and the body slumped to the ground; Bejah flinched and jerked away from it, so that it didn’t touch her. 

“Now,” the woman purred softly, “I think it’s time that you and I-”

“Where is Spiro?” Bejah blurted out, before she could help herself. She was trembling so badly, her arms wrapped tight around her middle.

The woman paused, and the tension in the room grew so sharp that Bejah felt her teeth chattering. “Do not interrupt me, girl,” she said quietly, finally. “I will not tolerate disrespect.” 

“I want my droid,” she whispered, still staring at the floor. She didn’t want to look up at her again. 

“What you want is negligible. Come. It is time for us to leave.”

“I _want_ my _droid_.”

“How does a slave come to be in possession of a droid?”

Bejah gritted her teeth, already hating this woman. “I wanted one,” she said stubbornly, as if that would explain the years of painstaking salvage and careful construction to bring Spiro to life. 

The woman made a noise that sounded almost like a laugh. “And so you took one. How very Sith-like of you. Yes, you will do well indeed.” There was a compulsion in her head, a sudden desire to rise to her feet, and she was wobbling dangerously before she realised that the thought hadn’t come from herself. The woman was at her side, smiling with too many teeth as she beamed down at her. “Let us fetch your little pet, shall we?”

Bejah had nothing to say to that, because above all else she knew she was a coward- she didn’t want to die, and this woman could very easily kill her, and she didn’t want to be alone, so she needed her help if she was going to get Spiro back. 

“Am I going to be a Sith?” she whispered, even though she still had no idea what that was. 

“You will be the greatest Sith of all, girl,” the woman said, as she led her from the room; it took Bejah a moment to work out what was wrong, and she realised with a dizzy gasp that she was not indoors any more. The door had led them straight to the outside. _Outside_.

_She could see the sky._


	2. Fear

Her mother taught her all about her destiny from the moment she was born. 

She was a Pureblood Sith, a living manifestation of the greatest Dark Side race in the galaxy since the fall of the ancient Rakata; she could trace her bloodlines back to the ancient Lords of the Sith, those very first exiles who had turned their back on the weakness that was the Jedi Order and sought to forge a new and greater future in the Outer Rim. 

Her ancestors had been gods to the slaves they conquered, her mother had whispered to her, and she would be again. It was her birthright, her destiny. Instead she was a slave, cast out and despised, nothing more than an object to be bartered and sold at the whims of people far above her. That a sith with such a powerful bloodline could be reduced to such a shameful state was the fault of her father, a weak and pathetic man as far as Kallathe was concerned. 

Her mother insisted on her using her father’s name, Jen’zuska, despite the fact that he had disavowed them both, because he was but a single discrepancy in a long line of proud and powerful lords, a discrepancy that she would correct once she was old enough. 

Her father, Lord Lazûl Jen’zuska, was a very powerful man, a warrior from the front lines in the war against the pox that was the Republic who had distinguished himself a dozen times over and more. He was ruthless, an excellent field tactician and a terror who struck panic into Republic ranks when he stepped into the fray. Despite the unkind comments that circulated suggesting his grandmother had been a Massasi, he was highly regarded amongst the social elite of the Empire. 

He was well on his way to earning the rank of Darth when he wedded the very eligible Lady Emira Veskiira, a Pureblood woman who was equally as distinguished in the ongoing war with the Jedi, and granddaughter to the great late Lord Vindican, Liberator of Korriban. Theirs was a match of great acclaim, sure to produce some of the finest Pureblood children of their generation. 

Except, that was not precisely what happened. 

Lazûl kept a mistress or two to satisfy himself when his wife was away on the front lines or otherwise engaged, just as she likely kept lovers of her own. The arrangement was typical, and they politely did not enquire after one another’s affairs- until it came about that one of Lazûl’s concubines was pregnant. 

Bad enough that he risked the wrath of his wife’s family in the first place by shaming her like this, but for it to be his first child? His heir? Born a bastard out of wedlock, to a woman with scarcely a fraction of the lineage and connections that Lady Veskiira had?

It was unthinkable. 

Emira made her fury known to all, and for a few weeks the story was the talk of Kaas City- Lord Jen’zuska’s bastard, the child who would tear down his glorious dreams of power and wealth, who threatened his chances of a seat on the Dark Council in the future just by wont of their existence. Emira was a powerful woman in the more conservative circles of sith politics, and Lazûl’s hopes had been pinned on the support of such a faction to legitimise his rise to power- he was still young, of course, only in his mid twenties, and with plenty of time in the future to build his power and influence, but with his carefully constructed house of cards threatening to topple down around him, he made the choice that made the most sense to him in order to secure his future. 

He had his mistress arrested, and condemned to slavery, assuming the hard labour would be enough to end the pregnancy, or that the babe would have no chance of surviving the life that would follow should it survive to birth. 

So it was that Xeria found herself cast out and pregnant, violently branded against her will and with no one to save her from the machinations of her lover and his wife. The first week was a nightmare she would never forget, the burns on her face still fresh and raw, the slavers cruel and lecherous, and in hindsight it was a miracle that she had not miscarried in those dark and awful days. On the sixth day, lying listless and aching in her cell from the violence that had been done to her during the night, she didn’t even bother to lift her head at the sounds of locks being turned and forcefields being lowered, the sound of a single pair of boots shuffling over the slimy, rusty floor. This wasn’t a viewing area for stock, this was just a holding pen, one of dozens where new slaves were held in darkness and discomfort until their spirits broke. No one would be coming down here looking to buy her.

She closed her eyes in horrified grief, bracing herself for a new round of atrocities. 

The sound of someone _tsking_ as if in disapproval had her eyes snapping open again, narrowing in the darkness as she tried to make out the features of her visitor. They were tall, and somewhat lanky, and the faint outline of their face in the weak light bouncing down the corridor from the main hall revealed sharper edges to their cheekbones and chin, suggesting spurs and facial ridges. 

Another Pureblood, then. 

Xeria steeled herself, careful to remain deathly still.

“I know you are awake, my dear, so trickery will get you nowhere at this point,” the stranger said, their voice deep and faintly amused. “Although I must say, I admire your tenacity, still trying to keep your wits about you after a week in this... _delightful_ establishment.” 

There was no point to continuing to pretend, so she levered herself into a seating position, chin lifted proudly as she wrapped her arms around her to compensate for her ripped clothing. “Who are you?” she asked bluntly, because there was nothing to be gained from word games right now. “You clearly know who I am, so do me the courtesy of knowing who it is I speak to.”

“Perhaps a little civility would be in order, my dear? I am, after all, the best placed individual to see to your safety...” They trailed off, and she felt her skin crawl at the satisfaction oozing off of them. “And your child, of course.”

“You have already made up your mind, or else you would not be here pretending to be a gentleman,” she countered boldly. “If I beg now, I begin the entirety of our relationship- whatever you intend it to be- in a position of weakness.”

“So _suspicious_ -”

“I did not rise to the position of a Lord’s mistress by being some daft ingenue,” she said. “And I will be damned if I leave myself at the mercy of a man thinking with his cock ever again.” 

“Then you will be relieved, my dear, to hear that your talents in the boudoir are of no interest to me.”

Xeria hesitated, exhausted and tired and frustrated and clinging desperately to what shards of her pride remained; would it really be such a bad thing if she stooped to begging, if she got down on her belly and wept on his feet, wailing at him to take pity on her and her unborn child? She couldn’t tell if she still carried the babe within her, not given how much blood she’d lost during the assaults by the slavers, and the fact that they’d kept her in near darkness the entire time, and at the moment she wasn’t sure whether she even cared. This child had brought her nothing but misery and pain so far, and her feelings towards it were far from maternal. 

“Ahh, I see I’ve piqued your interest.” 

She licked her lips, wincing at how cracked and bloody they were, her tongue stinging the open wounds. “Tell me your name, and what you intend to do with me,” she said quietly. 

His soft laughter made her close her eyes as if in pain. “My name is Lord Zhivalla,” he said. 

Xeria felt a wave of nausea that she hoped was just from the pain. “You served Dread Master Brontes,” she said, wondering whether any of this was real or whether it was just an induced hallucination, toying with her mind. 

“My, my, you do pay attention to your politics, don’t you?” 

“What do you want with me?” 

He cocked his head to the side. “It’s not you I’m interested in, my dear,” he said, his voice kindly. “I’m interested in the child you carry.”

______

Kallathe was born in secret on Dromund Kaas, in the extensive and elaborate estate owned by Lord Zhivalla; as far as her father knew, she and her mother had been purchased months ago, and were very probably dead. As far as the other servants on the estate knew, Xeria was just another slave, albeit with a peculiar relationship with the lord of the house. She was never even sure whether Zhivalla’s immediate family knew who she was, or whether it was just a secret kept between the three of them. Surely it had to be a source of gossip amongst the staff and slaves, Zhivalla bringing home a pregnant slave woman without any elaboration, but she never heard any mention of it when she was older. 

The Lord ran a very strict household, and his people knew better than to earn his ire. 

The Great Galactic War was well and truly into its second decade, and several months before her conception, the Republic had declared the Dread Masters to be slain. The six greatest sith in the Empire after the Emperor himself, masters of the Phobis Devices, allegedly gone for good; Zhivalla had only been one of many to study and serve under the Dread Masters, dedicating his service to the dark sorceress Brontes, the Architect of Fear. Her control of the Dark Side had been utterly unrivalled, her ability to evoke terror and fear in her victims without equal, and her loss- along with the rest of the Dread Masters- would be felt keenly by the Empire for years to come. 

With no master, and a need to distinguish himself in a crowded field of Sith Lords who were increasingly impressed by Darth Malgus’ more unorthodox politics, Zhivalla turned his attention to the next generation- namely, finding someone to take up his master’s torch, someone to carry on in her place.

And what better place to start than with a blank slate, a child who had known no other way of life, a child from a verified bloodline sure to see her blessed with significant Force sensitivity?

And what an _honour_ it was, to be chosen to follow in the footsteps of a woman who had shaped the path of the Empire for centuries. This she was reminded of every time she grew bored of her lessons as a child, fidgeting and short-tempered, lashing out at her teachers in childish frustration. 

That was not to say that she wasn’t _good_ at her lessons, certainly- she was nothing less than a marvel, soaking up knowledge like some kind of sponge, and her tutors praised her as a prodigy. By the age of four, she was capable of inflicting Force-induced terror on the weak minded, and by the age of five she could do it to multiple subjects at once. When she was in the mood for it, she seemed to treat it as a game, delighting in the gibbering panic of the slaves Lord Zhivalla brought before her to practice on. 

By age seven, with concentration, she could distract her tutors, individuals with decades more experience with the Force than she had; with focus, she could cause them to forget the purpose of the lessons, to grow distracted and absent minded, or to dismiss her presence entirely. 

By the time she was eight, she drove one of the guard captains into such a frenzied state of hysterical terror that he killed himself. This was, apparently, an outburst related to the fact that someone had finally updated her on the state of her father’s family- namely, that he had not suffered and languished after condemning her mother to slavery while pregnant, but had flourished instead. He was now Darth Derisus, a man with a powerful voice in Imperial political affairs, and more importantly- as far as Kallathe was concerned- he had a son. An heir. Some measly, spoiled brat of a boy, who sat at the tables she had been denied access to and who lounged in the lap of luxury that she had been forbidden and who was offered the slavish attention of a mother and father both. 

A half-brother for her. 

She wanted to eat his heart. 

Zhivalla seemed to delight in this new surge in aggression, and never sought to discipline her for it. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to encourage her anger, just as her mother did- Xeria saw her as an outlet for her own rage, the mechanism for her revenge against the man who had jilted her and left her for dead. There was fear in the eyes of the servants around the estate, but Zhivalla spoke quite candidly of the pride he felt in her accomplishments, and Xeria whispered praise to her in the quiet of their tiny room, promising her all of the power and glory and fear that her father had denied her. 

Both of them frustrated her, because as much as they coddled her and praised her, she knew without a doubt that they were also belittling her, talking down to her. She was already stronger than her mother and yet her mother spoke to her as if she was an infant, not a girl of nine and a bit- it was insulting. Her mother didn’t seem to _do_ anything, because if she worked with the other servants and slaves there was a chance someone would recognise her, and word would trickle out into the world that Darth Derisus’ former mistress was seen comfortably ensconced in the estate of Lord Zhivalla, which absolutely would not do. 

When she was ten, Zhivalla had her attend a gala he was hosting, dressed like the family’s poor cousin and loudly bemoaned for her lack of Kaas City manners; it was a ruse, of course, a lie to cover her true purpose throughout the evening, but the dismissal still stung. As a child, no one looked twice at her, and certainly no one thought to guard against her exponentially growing powers- wandering through the sea of assembled guests, she was all but invisible, turning their attention away from her with barely a whisper of the Force. 

She found two lords scheming against Zhivalla, both of whom she placed seeds of unease and suspicion in their hearts, and by the end of the evening they had devolved into a screaming match, trying to claw one another’s eyes out. A married woman was having an affair with her husband’s mistress, and she toyed with her thoughts long enough to leave her aroused to the point of distraction, her eyes wild and her chest heaving as she snapped irritably at her spouse and stared too long at the women in the room. 

Another man, a moff by the colours on his uniform, tasted of cruelty and sadism, and his wife cowered at his side, her smile weak and trembling. He liked to hurt her, she found, so she gathered the memories from the wife’s head with careful fingers, plucking out the pain and the terror and the panic, and then turned and inflicted a decade’s worth of abuse on the husband in the space of a few minutes. He felt every blow, every burn, every moment of hysterical fear, and his screams silenced the gala quite effectively, a macabre circle of onlookers gathering to watch as his body jerked and writhed as it suffered through the phantom assault. No one paid attention to the little girl watching from the corner, but more than one called for their drink to be refreshed while they took in the spectacle. 

Kallathe watched the wife discreetly make her escape through a side door, rather than stay to bear witness to his death. It made sense, really, because so much of that pain had to be familiar to her, but she couldn’t help but think of her as weak; nothing would satisfy her more than to see her father suffer in her place, and the fact that this woman had vengeance meted out for her but turned away seemed such a pitiful waste to her. 

In the small hours of the morning, as the last of the guests finally made their way from the estate, Zhivalla patted her fondly on the head, like he would a dog. 

“A valiant effort,” he said, “but very sloppy. Your tutors will rouse you at dawn to go over your mistakes.” 

She was beginning to hate him too. 

______

“I want to go to the Academy.”

Lord Zhivalla looked up from where the slaves were tending to his daily ablutions, his eyes hooded with relaxed pleasure as they rubbed at his feet and shoulders. “What?”

“I want to go to the Academy,” Kallathe repeated. “I am Sith. I should be there.”

He let out a rumbling laugh, eyes already fluttering shut as if to shut her out. “My dear girl, we’ve been over this before,” he said lazily, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “The Academy is for those poor unlucky souls who have not been blessed enough to acquire a patron at a young age.”

“It is by Imperial edict that all Force sensitive citizens be taken to Korriban for testing and training,” she continued, feeling the hatred for this opulent fool grow in her chest. 

“Kallathe, my little bird, have we not talked about this? You are receiving training here, are you not? You are comfortable, and well fed-”

“I want to be a Sith Lord.” 

He sighed extravagantly, as if immensely disappointed at her insistence; he waved a hand dismissively at the slaves gathered to pamper him, and they rose in silence, gathering the tools of their arts and filing out of the room in quick procession. Left alone, Zhivalla rolled his head to the side, as if working out aches that the slaves had missed during the massage- it was a pointed remark for her, a reminder that she had interrupted his day and that he was not happy with it. 

She hated him so much. 

“Come closer, child,” he said, beckoning her towards his chaise. She crossed the room dutifully, careful never to offer an ounce more respect than propriety required her to, coming to a stop beside the lounge. He reached out, and she resisted the urge to recoil in disgust as he trailed a finger down the juvenile spurs on her cheek. “You are growing so _fast_ ,” he purred, and she jerked her head out of reach in revulsion, baring her teeth at him. “And such passion, such hate! Your powers grow with you-”

“So I should be in training,” she said, not bothering to hide the hate and the frustration in her voice. 

“But you are still so young, my little one,” he said, tutting the words at her as if she was an infant. He _tsked_ at her. “You are scarcely even thirteen-”

“I’m _fourteen_.” 

“Really? Why, that’s even worse than I suspected, you are so small and runty, my little bird. All of the other acolytes will be young adults, a decade older than you at least-”

“I am better than all of them!”

His fingers very suddenly had her chin pinched tight, his thumb pressing down on the budding spurs in the manner that would cause the most pain to the new appendages. “I am very fond of you, Kallathe,” he said softly, almost pleasantly, “but I am not fond of being interrupted. You lack respect, and discipline.” 

Her eyes were watering from the pain, and despite her best efforts a tear slid down onto her cheek; she stared furiously at him, and did not allow herself to falter. 

He smiled broadly at her silence. “There we go,” he said proudly. “See what you can achieve when you set your mind to it?” 

“Imagine what I could achieve if I was in training on Korriban.”

He sighed again, the sound almost mournful, as if she had hurt him. “My dear Kallathe, you are the heir to a legacy thousands of years old,” he said, his fingers gentle as he stroked her face; she wanted to be sick, the touch making her shudder with revulsion. “You follow in the footsteps of one of the greatest sith lords the galaxy has ever seen, a woman who could reshape reality to better suit her desires?” 

“If I could reshape reality to better suit my desires, I certainly would not be here.” 

He reached up and ruffled her hair, and she scowled at him and ducked away from his hand, trying to flatten her ruined hair back down again. “You are restless,” he said, “and I can respect that. Perhaps we are in need of a challenge for you, hmm? Something to test your abilities?” 

Kallathe felt her adrenalin surge with restless excitement, and she kept a straight face with extreme effort. “If it’s not too much _trouble_ ,” she hissed, drawing herself up to her rather laughable height of just over five foot. It was terribly hard to be intimidating when everyone towered over you. 

Lord Zhivalla rose to his feet, and she gritted her teeth and did not step aside for him; he chuckled softly, moving around her as he went to the side table and poured himself a drink. The liquid in the fine crystal was dark and thick, and it stained his lips when he lifted the tumbler to his mouth. “What,” he began slowly, “was the catalyst for the Dread Masters to evolve into the council of near deities that we know them as today?” 

He always spoke like that- as if they were not dead, but simply misplaced. As if the most powerful Force users in the galaxy with the exception of the Emperor himself could possibly be subdued without being killed. She would have fought to the death, were it her- no Jedi would have dared to keep her alive if they made her suffer through the indignity of captivity. Surely the Dread Masters, functionally immortal and infinitely powerful, would be far more incensed at the presumption that they could be tethered and caged like beasts. 

She found her own leash to be insult enough. 

“The Phobis Devices,” she said dutifully, as if it hadn’t been drilled into her a thousand thousand times since her birth. “Dark artifacts imbued with the fear of a hundred generations, enough to destroy the minds of tens of thousands, if not millions of people at once.”

“And how did the Dread Masters come to conquer the power of the devices?”

At that, she hesitated. “I- don’t know,” she admitted after a moment. “No one does.” 

“Indeed,” he mused. He seemed almost maudlin. “It was a secret they carried with them through all the years, and not even the most trusted members of their inner circle- apprentices, generals, fanatics, all one and the same- none of us were trusted with the secret.”

She felt an urge to roll her eyes. “How tragic for you all.” 

“Indeed,” he said, and the amusement in his tone made her hackles go up. He took another sip of the drink, a dribble of the thick liquid sliding past the corner of his mouth before he lapped it up with his tongue; she wrinkled her nose in disgust and looked away. “So imagine what an opportunity it would be if one could study the effects of one, to experience the full power of the device in its raw, untapped potential.”

She paused for a longer moment this time, considering. Untold number of sith had attempted to master the Phobis Devices before the Dread Masters had successfully unlocked their secrets, and all attempts had ended in death or madness. For Zhivalla to even hint that she could consider studying one of them was an immense honour, a vast endorsement of his faith in her powers and abilities...

... but it was also just as likely that it was a warning, a threat to keep her in line. She could almost hear it in his lofty tones now- be careful what you wish for, my dear, lest the reality be far beyond what your ego believes it can command. The Phobis Devices had left far better sith than she as nothing more than gibbering loons, screaming at shadowy phantoms in their own minds, or killed them outright as their hearts exploded from the overwhelming stress of their panic. 

She steeled herself. “What an excellent opportunity indeed,” she said, refusing to show fear. “Shall I wait for you to fetch me one for contemplation, or shall I pack a travel case?”

Zhivalla let out a bark of laughter, apparently impressed with her bravado. “As luck would have it, there is one only a day or two’s journey from where we stand,” he said, watching her carefully over the top of his glass. “The Phobis Core, hidden deep in the heart of Dark Temple, one of the Emperor’s sanctums.”

“But he is not there,” she said dubiously, “he has not been on Dromund Kaas for some time. Yes?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “That is a secret closely kept by the Dark Council and the Imperial Guard,” he said, something disdainful in his voice, as if he looked down on both establishments. “Regardless, you will not be able to enter the sanctum, and neither will you be able to access the Core.”

Kallathe bit her tongue in irritation. “Then what is the point?” she began, but he cut her off with another wave of his hand. 

“The core casts a miasma over the temple grounds, the power it contains so vast that it spills out into the surrounding environs. To stand in the shadow of the temple is to face the strength of the strongest and most fundamental segment of the devices- in effect, simply being in the vicinity of the Core has the same impact on the mind that holding one of the other segments in your bare hands does.”

“So? What’s the point?”

“The point, my dear, is that if you are so restlessly in need of a challenge, and if you are to truly take on the mantle of Brontes’ successor, then perhaps you should spend more time acquainting yourself with the source of her power.”

______

She was given rations to last her several days, and then she was unceremoniously dumped on the jungle’s edge, on the outskirts of Kaas City. It occurred to her that she could just seize on this opportunity to run, to find a shuttle to take her to Korriban, or to present herself to the Sith Sanctum in the city- but as much as her training instilled in her the complicated political networks of the Sith and the military hierarchy, she had no idea how much of it came to her unfiltered. If she turned herself in, would she only come face to face with more of Zhivalla’s allies, who would promptly return her to her master?

Better to face forward for now- better to conquer this challenge that he thought would humble her, better to laugh in his face when she returned triumphant. 

So she walked into the jungle, full of teenage zeal and a growing hatred for the man who owned her, confident that she could outwit him. 

It was only three days later when she was blinking groggily in confusion, her head throbbing as she stared around at unfamiliar stone walls and mossy tiles, that she realised he might have been right. She had no memory of at least the last thirty-six hours, no knowledge of how she had come to this place- and as she sat on the floor in bewilderment, she saw a soldier in Kaas City insignia go staggering past her, babbling in an archaic form of Basic that had been more common two thousand years ago. 

The Core was more powerful than she had anticipated, but she would rather die than admit defeat to Zhivalla.

So she gritted her teeth, and set down her bag of supplies, and turned her thoughts to meditation. 

When she left the jungle six days later, her thoughts clear and her stride triumphant, Zhivalla’s guard was waiting to escort her home. Near to strutting with overconfidence, Kallathe swaggered through the door expecting a grand welcome... only to find Zhivalla and his family out for the evening, engaged for a night at the opera. Frustrated to the point of exploding for her need to have her accomplishment acknowledged- remaining sane in the presence of the Phobis Core for over a week- she instead went to her quarters to have her mother coo and fuss over her, and whisper great plans to her of how she would one day crush her father underfoot and take her legacy back from her simpering half brother.

There was a single cot in the room, instead of two. A single storage chest, instead of two. The sheets were fresh and starched, the stone floor scrubbed with chemicals so harsh they still lingered in the air, stinging her nostrils. 

There was absolutely no evidence that her mother had ever occupied this room, no remnants of her at all. No loose hairs fallen from a brush, no stale perfume on the air. Nothing. 

Zhivalla said nothing about her absence when he returned the next day. Neither did the servants, or the slaves, though none would meet her gaze. 

So she said nothing either. 

But her hate grew.

______

Zhivalla had a daughter, a year or two older than Kallathe was, and Kallathe knew two things about her- that she was not allowed to go anywhere near her, and that she was the most beautiful creature that she had ever seen in her life. Her name was Jayal, or as was more proper the Lady Jayal Zhivalla, and Kallathe saw her occasionally around the estate at a distance, or at the elegant functions that Zhivalla threw to impress the other Lords and social elite of Kaas City. Her father doted on her extensively, as his only child, and she was never anything less than a vision of loveliness whenever Kallathe happened to glimpse her. 

The gold she wore on her face and body was as elegant as she was, carefully designed by master artisans to complement her beauty and her cruelty, without ever making her look gaudy or gauche; her deep auburn hair was always pulled back from her face in the most fashionable styles, held in place with gold pins and sheer scarves that shimmered in the flash of the lightning. Kallathe was only ever reminded of how brutish she was considered by Zhivalla, and by the Empire in general, when she watched Jayal entertain her guests in the garden- she with her close shorn hair, slicked back against her skull to keep it from interfering with her work, with her chunky, blunt gold jewellery that had no finesse, no elegance. 

She was an instrument of violence, as ugly as her craft, and Jayal was a work of art, a pleasure to the senses. 

She was not the first woman Kallathe had ever been attracted to, but she was by far the one who grew to occupy her thoughts in a way no other woman had. Jayal surely had to be aware of her presence in the estate, given how much of her father’s time was given over to training her, and yet she did not seem the slightest bit intrigued by the apprentice that walked the very same halls as her. 

Over the last few years, her power had grown exponentially, and now as a part of her training she was expected to spend at least part of each month in the grounds of the Dark Temple, always testing herself against the abyssal horror of the Phobis Core. Sometimes if she lost her concentration, she lost an afternoon or a full day, but she always regained control again in the end, always able to walk the halls of the ancient temple and amuse herself with the secrets she found hidden therein. 

Except the sanctum, of course. As Zhivalla had said, there was simply no way for her to breach the doors, and the miasma in the air was thicker there; she could only stand against it for so long before she had to retreat, her heart pounding and her thoughts consumed with violence and blood and fucking and shadowy abominations that made her want to claw her eyes out to escape the sight of them. 

But it was good for her, in the end, because by the age of twenty-four she had eclipsed every single one of her tutors and teachers, she was stronger than every one of the guards and security droids that the estate kept on hand, and she knew- she _knew_ , deep in her heart- that she was stronger than Zhivalla as well. 

And she was tired of being his project, his little pet assassin kept in a dark closet until he needed her skills to advance his agenda or his social standing. Her father was now on the Dark Council, one of the most powerful Sith in the entirety of the Empire, and her brother had been a favoured pupil at the Academy for the last year now. 

She wanted more. 

She was going to start with Jayal. 

It was easy enough to wait for a morning when Zhivalla was out of the estate on business, and Jayal was amusing herself in the gardens again- she liked to read in a particular grove, a cushioned lounge and elegant crystal lights placed around the perimetre for her benefit, and Kallathe had often watched her reclining beneath the purple skies, the lightning highlighting the elegant golden adornments on her exposed skin. She prowled the edge of the garden to find all of the hidden guards, placing confusion and misdirection in their thoughts as she sent them off to attend to new duties, far away from the secluded grove. 

Jayal had a single handmaiden with her, a young woman Kallathe had slept with several months ago in an effort to distract herself from thoughts of the Lady before her; it hadn’t worked. The handmaiden had been timid and hesitant, her touches never enough of _anything_ for her satisfaction, and the entire time that she’d been fucking her, she’d been unable to stop herself from wondering if Jayal was this timid as well, or whether she dug her golden tipped nails into the back of her lover until they bled. Whether she dragged the spurs on the back of her ankles over their calves and thighs to leave the skin raw and bloodied as she screamed and writhed. 

It wasn’t too far a stretch of the imagination to make the handmaiden appear clumsy, and it took but a single flicker of her power to have her fumble with the tea set, the elegant cup and saucer tumbling to the ground. From this distance, Kallathe couldn’t hear what was obviously a pitiful and pathetic apology, complete with much hand-wringing, but Jayal waved the girl away to fetch a replacement without a backward glance. 

Leaving the Lady alone, and unguarded; Kallathe hissed out a satisfied breath, waiting until the handmaiden had vanished in the direction of the kitchens, before stepping out from beneath the cover of the trees. A flash of lightning illuminated the grove at that very moment, and Kallathe could not have been more pleased if she’d planned it that way. 

Jayal glanced up absently at the movement, clearly thinking her approach to be nothing more than a silent bodyguard, and then did an almost comical double-take when she realised it was not one of her father’s guardians. 

Kallathe smiled slowly at her. “Good afternoon, my Lady,” she said softly, her voice carrying over the space with careful use of her power. “I hope I am not disturbing you?”

She saw Jayal swallow nervously, her eyes flitting over her form- she’d taken particular care with her appearance today, clad in black leather pants that hugged her ass like a second skin and a sleeveless black vest that was perhaps a size too small for her voluptuous figure, pushing her breasts up and her belly out through the gap above her pants. It had the added benefit of displaying her finely muscled arms to great effect, and she’d eschewed wearing her gold arm bands precisely so that her muscles would be viewed without hindrance. She’d polished the rest of her gold piercings until they shone like new, and she’d slicked back her hair with oils, making it look dark and sleek instead of coarse and roughly hacked. 

She’d made herself look dangerous and forbidden, a far cry from the elegant lords and ladies of the ballrooms of Kaas City, and even the soldiers in their dress uniforms; she wanted to look wicked and tempting, just the thing to thrill a bored young noble lady and coax her into straying from the more sensible path her father had in store for her. 

And judging by the way Jayal’s pupils dilated and her cheeks flushed, she’d intrigued her at the very least. “I- not at all,” Jayal said, her voice somewhat breathless. She bit her lip, and Kallathe’s smile widened. “You’re the assassin, aren’t you? Father’s apprentice?”

“Assassin is such a _common_ word, my Lady,” she said, sauntering towards her and delighting in the way Jayal’s gaze fell to her hips. “Any halfwit thug can call himself an assassin when he clubs someone to death in an alleyway. My talents are far more... _exquisite_.” 

“Oh.” A glance at her lips.

She came to a stop beside the luxurious couch- it was larger than the pitiful bed she slept on in the tiny quarters Zhivalla allowed her to have- and gestured to Jayal’s feet. “Your handmaiden has left you unfinished,” she said, sinking onto the cushion beside Jayal’s bare feet. The handmaiden had been in the process of tending to a pedicure, complete with painting her nails with brilliantly gold polish to match her piercings. Interrupted by Kallathe’s tampering, Jayal had been left with her skirt rucked up to her knees, exposing her lean red calves and spurred ankles. “May I be of assistance, my Lady?”

“Oh, no, I mean, it’s no trouble, it’s-” Jayal’s words cut off on a sharp intake of breath as Kallathe reached down and carefully grasped her ankle, pulling her foot onto her lap. Jayal’s mouth hung open as Kallathe took up the little bottle of paint and delicately began to apply paint to the neglected nails, her fingers firm but gentle as she held her ankle in place. 

“This is an excellent colour for you, my Lady,” Kallathe said conversationally, while her fingers stroked gently at the sensitive skin on the inside of her ankle. She could hear Jayal’s breathing slowly quicken, and she blew gently on her toes to help the paint set, biting back a grin at the way Jayal moaned softly. “It complements your skin so well.”

“Thank you,” Jayal said, her voice wobbling dangerously, and beneath Kallathe’s fingers her skin broke out in shivers. 

“I imagine you are quite accustomed to being told how extraordinarily beautiful you are,” Kallathe said, and Jayal let out a little noise of protest. 

“You say it as if you expect me to be vain about it,” she said. 

“Not at all, my Lady,” she said, blowing on her toes again now that another nail was painted. “I merely despair at finding any words to convey to you how very lovely I find you, given that you must have heard every form of flattery under the sun.” 

Jayal bit her lip, her facial ridges far more pronounced with the blood rushing to her face. “I...”

“Yes, Lady Jayal?”

She let out a breathless gasp at the sound of her name, her fingers digging in tight to the cushions either side of her hips. “We won’t know for sure unless you try,” she whispered, her eyes dark with lust. 

Hah- clever brat, digging for praise. Kallathe had to wonder if it was this easy for her fancy friends, if a sweet word was all it took for anyone to get beneath her skirts. If that was the case, she thought eagerly, she’d have plenty of opportunity to satiate herself between her legs. 

Kallathe set down the little bottle of paint on the side table, but did not let go of her leg. “Do you know that I have longed to touch you for years now,” she said, stroking her fingers up the inside of her calf, running a sharpened nail over the ridges on the back of the leg. “I watched you from a distance, and I ached for you-”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Jayal blurted out, just shy of panting.

Kallathe adopted a rueful smile. “I could not ever believe that a woman as delicate as you are could ever desire the attentions of a brutish killer like myself,” she said with artfully contrived sadness. “And, well...”

“And what?”

“No, I mustn’t say-”

Jayal pointed at her sharply. “In my father’s absence I am the lord of the estate, so I _command_ you to tell me.”

Kallathe tried not to grit her teeth- she’d played right into her hands, but the fact that she’d resorted to pulling on her leash to remind her of her slavery made something simmer in her belly that was not at all friendly. “Surely you must know that your father has forbidden us to spend any time together, my Lady,” she said reluctantly, tiptoeing along the line between melodramatic and plausible. “If we were to be seen together, I would be gravely punished.”

Jayal surprised her by letting out a delighted moan, tipping her head back and exposing her throat to Kallathe’s hungry gaze; fuck, but she’d love to leave bite marks there. “You risk my father’s wrath for me?” she asked eagerly, her leg squirming in her grasp. 

Apparently she’d underestimated how shy and retiring the young lady was, but no matter. “For a kiss from you, I would risk the wrath of the Emperor himself,” she began, but Jayal already had the answer she wanted.

She surprised her further by planting her free foot on the couch and lifting her hips, tugging her skirt up around her waist to reveal that she was not wearing anything beneath it. She spread her legs wide, exposing her cunt to Kallathe’s suddenly dry mouth. “I have more interesting places to kiss than my mouth,” she said impatiently. “If you want to defy my father, make it worth both our time.”

Delighted by this turn of events, Kallathe shifted, kneeling on the couch between Jayal’s splayed legs. “As you desire, my Lady,” she purred, settling down between her thighs before lowering her mouth to her cunt.

She was already wet, and Kallathe closed her eyes to savour the taste of her beneath her tongue, her hands sliding under her thighs to grasp at her buttocks and pull her closer; Jayal moaned wantonly, her fingers sliding into Kallathe’s hair and tugging hard. Taking that as encouragement to enjoy herself, Kallathe traced her tongue along the length of her cleft before closing her lips over the swollen bud of her clitoris, sucking hard. 

Jayal was clearly no stranger to pleasure, grinding her hips up against Kallathe’s face and squeezing her thighs against her shoulders so impatiently that it was almost adorable. Smiling as she suckled on her greedily, Kallathe let go of her ass and let one clawed finger dip towards her core, delighting in the way Jayal all but shrieked when she slid it inside of her. 

“Yes,” she panted, rutting her hips against her face, “yes, yes-”

“ _No!_ ”

They both jerked upright, Kallathe falling back onto her knees and Jayal hastily trying to drag her skirt back down; on the far side of the grove, near to the kitchen doors, stood Zhivalla, his face near to apocalyptic with rage.

Kallathe felt her senses sharpen and she knew with abrupt clarity that she would not have a better opportunity than this. 

“Get away from my daughter, you mongrel _filth_ ,” Zhivalla snarled, lightning dripping from his clawed fingers. 

With very deliberate insult, Kallathe reached up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, pausing to lick her fingers one by one; Jayal watched her with wide eyes, and if she wasn’t mistaken, she was _aroused_ by the confrontation. _You risk my father’s wrath for me_ , she’d said eagerly, and part of her enthusiasm to dive straight into sex made a little more sense now. 

What an intriguing young woman. 

“Or what, Master?” she purred, coming slowly to her feet and sauntering slowly towards him, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Something terrible will happen to me?”

“You knew my instructions regarding Jayal, and you have deliberately disobeyed me!”

Kallathe pursed her lips in a smirk. “I _have_ ,” she said with false shame. “And I think I enjoyed it.”

Zhivalla’s eyes grew hard, and she could see the gears turning in his head as he realised she had no intention of backing down. “Mind your place, slave,” he said quietly, a single warning.

She made a point of considering it. And then shrugged. “No,” she said simply.

And then she attacked. 

Zhivalla was ready for her, and given that he’d overseen her training since birth, he knew most of her favoured techniques and attacks. He blocked her intrusion easily, and responded in kind, a dark shard of fear sliding into her heart and attempting to take root. 

That just infuriated her.

“What is your greatest fear, Master?” she asked, her fingers curled into claws as dark shadows writhed around her outstretched hands and surged towards his head. “Is it failure? Insignificance? Humiliation?” 

Behind her, Jayal was screaming, but she ignored her; Zhivalla fought her, _hard_ , but it was just as she’d assumed. He was weaker than her, and though his shields and his techniques were near to flawless, she was far more powerful, and even the most carefully constructed shield would buckle eventually under a stronger force. She bombarded him with psychic energy, wielding the Force like a master craftsman, and she could see the strain and the panic in his eyes. 

“Desist, slave!” he roared, lightning crackling around his hands as he tried to draw enough energy to lash out at her, but unable to pull his attention away from deflecting her attack. 

“Or what? You’ll enslave me further? Murder my mother? Subject me to torture and madness in the name of training me?” Her anger grew, and she screamed as she lashed him with further attacks; in front of her, Zhivalla went to one knee, staggering under the weight of the assault. “When was the last time you felt afraid, Master? When did you last feel terror?”

“ _I will destroy you!_ ” 

She made a tsking noise, shaking her head. “I think not,” she said, her powers surging through him until he screamed hysterically, sinking down to his hands and knees. The pressure was absurd, and Kallathe thought that she might have started bleeding from her nose, but she wasn’t about to stop and check. Not when her concentration was needed here. 

She crossed the small grove until she was standing over him, her Master, grovelling and writhing at her feet at last. She wanted to feel delighted, triumphant, but instead she just felt bitterly angry that she’d allowed him to hurt her for so long. “Is it the knowledge that you have disappointed your beloved Master Brontes?” she asked, crouching down in front of him and taking his face in her hands; he was bleeding from the nose and the eyes, and there was spittle hanging from his mouth as he wheezed and panted.

“I will _kill you_ , girl,” he rasped.

She cocked her head to the side, probing further into his rapidly fracturing mind. “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “It’s a sarlacc. How positively mundane.” 

With a final gesture, she settled the image in Zhivalla’s head and bore down, his hysterical screams echoing around the small grove until his heart gave out from the pressure. She felt him die, and she wanted to feel satisfied, she wanted to stand over his body and feel rejuvenated by his death, soaking in the pain and the panic and the terror that she had caused.

Instead she saw only a weak old man, dead from heart failure, his face covered in blood and foam and spittle. 

She felt the sizzle in the air a fraction of a second before Jayal attempted to strike her with lightning- she had the same talent as her father, how quaint- and Kallathe put up a bored hand to block the incoming bolt. The lightning struck her hand and surged up her arm; she gritted her teeth and bore the pain, rising to her feet and turning to face Jayal without any indication that the lightning was anything more than an annoyance for her. 

“Enough,” she snapped, and Jayal actually complied, her eyes wide with panic and anger and grief as they swung wildly between Kallathe and her father’s body. A shame- she hadn’t thought her loyalties to her father had been that profound. She hated to leave their brief affair on such poor terms. “You should be congratulating yourself- you are the lord of the estate in full now.”

Jayal only stared at her.

Kallathe rolled her eyes in disgust. “Congratulations on your elevation,” she said, sketching a mocking bow towards her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find a shuttle to take me to Korriban.”


	3. Worms

His mother screamed for them to hide in the cellar, as the sky turned to flames above them. 

No one had thought that the war would come as far as Alderaan; the war was something that happened in systems thousands of light years away, on the very edge of civilised space. War, bloody and violent and apocalyptic as it was, did not come to the more enlightened places of the galaxy, and certainly not the burnished halls and rich green fields of a world that was almost synonymous with the Republic and democracy. 

In hindsight, it probably made sense that they would strike so deep, and at such a shining target, for what better way to sow discord and fear than to tarnish a planet that had stood with the Republic for tens of thousands of years? It was a message, a warning- if Alderaan is not safe, then nowhere is safe. The Empire will find you, and the Empire will crush you. 

He’d never seen warships like that before, sharp and jagged, dark triangles that blotted out the sun as they swarmed over the sky; the lasers of the ships clashed with the planetary defenses, streaks of colour ricocheting in all directions against a sky that was a murky red as the clouds reflected the fires from below. They lived two days outside of Aldera by speeder, and even from this distance they could see the black clouds rising from the horizon as the capital burned. 

There was ash floating down from the sky after the third day, and on the fourth day they watched in silence as a dark ship- a TIE fighter, Pa called it- went careening into the mountainside, trailing smoke as it fell. The explosion echoed through the cliffs and made the snow slide down towards the valley, and at least it was summer and they didn’t have to worry about fresh snowfalls and avalanches. 

Ma and Pa had them pack their bags after the first day, but they hadn’t left yet. Where could they go, anyway, given that the Sith were in all of the cities? There was word coming through that they had the royal family, and that Aldera was nothing but rubble, so it wasn’t like they could try to make a run for the spaceport and hope to get offworld. The best thing they could do was wait, to see if the Empire would take the time to march across every inch of Alderaanian soil, or whether the Republic would come to save them. 

So they waited. 

And on the fifth day, the Empire came. 

They came from the west side of town, and the north, herding people from the outlying farms towards the township proper; there were flames close enough to see if he stood on his hovercart and peered towards the mountains, the plumes of smoke black as they curled towards the sky. Distant explosions boomed around the valley, the echoes reflected back at them a dozen times over before they died away, and the screaming had already begun. 

“ _Kaltix!_ ” His mother’s voice had been hysterical, panicked, and he’d scrambled down off of the hovercart in a hurry. “Do you have your bag? Where is your sister?”

“I’ll get it, Ma,” he’d said, scurrying past her and into the homestead to fetch his emergency pack, while behind him he heard Pa pull up with their fastest speeder at the front gate. He loped up the stairs towards his room, pulling his bag out from beneath his bed before looking around wistfully at all the things he hadn’t packed. _Maybe_ there was room for his Captain Corellia figurine if he took out his other pair of shoes-

Something exploded close to the house, enough for the windows to shatter throughout; Kaltix was blown off of his feet and thrown against the far wall, and for several long moments he lay dazed, his ears ringing and his body aching and head feeling remarkably light and floaty, like it was full of air. After a bit, he began to hear things again, the roar of the flames and the sound of lasers firing, and he could hear shouting as well; it was hard, but he lifted his head and looked around, blinking. 

The wall to his bedroom was gone, the sky yawning in front of him through the smoke and twisted metal that used to be the side of the house. His bag was a foot or two away and he crawled to his hands and knees with difficulty, trying not to cry at the ache in his head. 

Ma had said Daree wasn’t outside yet, she’d asked him if he knew where she was. Her room was next to his, and if she’d been watching out of the window when the shell had landed- 

He grunted and stumbled to his feet, looping his bag over his shoulders and neck, jogging into the hallway while it thumped against his hip. “Ree!” he yelled over the crunch and crackle of the burning building. “Ree! Where are you?” 

Somehow, over all the noise, he heard a small whimper; maybe it was his special sense for things that helped, the stuff that Ma said was a gift. He could hear things sometimes that he shouldn’t, and if he wanted to be he could be zippy fast, almost fast enough to catch up to a speeder. Sometimes, if he concentrated, he could make coloured sparks in the air for Ree, and they’d sit out by the vineyard under the stars and he’d make tiny shooting lights in a rainbow of colours for her to chase. 

It was sort of like a Jedi thing, they said, but he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. If someone thought he was a Jedi, they might try to take him away, and make him fight in the war; better to keep it secret, so that he could stay home and stay safe. 

Now the war had come to them, and he wasn’t at all ready. 

“Ree!” he yelled again, flinching as a hot ember landed on his cheek, swatting it away furiously. “ _Ree!_ ”

He heard a tiny whimper somehow, and he scrambled down onto his hands and knees to find Daree crouched under the side table in the hallway. Her face was filthy with soot, and the tears streaming down her cheeks carved through the dirt almost comically. “Kally,” she wailed, reaching forward with a small hand. 

Kaltix grabbed her hand and tugged out from beneath the table. “We gotta go, Ree,” he said, urging her towards the stairs. “Come on-”

“I don’t have my bag-”

“We don’t have time!” The fire hadn’t spread to the ground floor yet, and the smoke was much thinner; he herded her towards the front door, a task made more difficult every time she tried to turn around and point back up the stairs to where her room had once been. Ma was waiting for them at the front door, and she grabbed Ree up into her arms to speed things along as Kaltix ran after her. 

Pa was by the front gate with the speeder, racing back towards the driver’s seat after settling something in the back seat. They ran towards him, Ree wailing loudly in Ma’s arms, Kaltix struggling to keep up with his bag thumping heavily against his legs, and Pa stood up in the seat and gestured for them to hurry; from the direction of town, there were more explosions, and there was smoke everywhere, a giant black pillar rising up over them like a storm. 

Everything went in slow motion from that moment on. 

His ears were still ringing, and the sound sort of faded away entirely as it happened- Pa was standing up in his seat, but then he jerked forward abruptly, toppling over into the speeder. Ma tried to lurch to a stop, Ree sobbing in her arms as Kaltix stumbled and fell over onto his hands and knees. Ma was screaming, and he couldn’t see Pa anymore, and then Ma was grabbing at his shirt and dragging him upright, turning and urging him back towards the house.

“The cellar, Kal, get to the cellar, we need to hide in the cellar!”

He could do that, he could get to the cellar- 

“Faster, Kal, faster!”

Zippy fast, that’s what he needed, he needed to use the special part of him-

Everything went very bright, and his feet were blown out from under him, and then he passed out.

______

When he came to, every single part of him was aching and sore; he lay in place for awhile, making quiet whimpering noises while he waited for Ma to come along and press her hand to his forehead and fuss over him. But she didn’t come over to him, and so he made louder noises, grumping and tossing and turning as he tried to get comfortable on the ground. 

“Quit your whining, boy,” came an unfamiliar voice, sullen and curt, and Kaltix froze. 

“Leave the kid alone,” another voice said tiredly, and it wasn’t one he recognised either. Were there other folk from town hiding in the cellar with them? “You right there kid?”

Kaltix blinked groggily, opening his eyes with some difficulty; the light was very dim, only just enough to see by, but it still made his eyes ache something fierce. It took a few seconds for things to come into focus, and the handful of lights scattered about still had weird halos glowing around them, enough that he had to squint and look away from them. 

And then it hit him- he wasn’t in the cellar. 

He lurched into a sitting position, scampering back from the two strange adults in front of him, only to thump into yet a third body behind him. He let out a startled yelp, his heart surging into his throat in a panic. 

“Woah, easy kid,” the second voice said again. “You’re okay, you’re safe-”

Someone laughed. 

“Shut up, Coop,” they said irritably. “He’s like seven or something, go easy.”

“I’m _twelve_ ,” Kaltix snapped, horrified at the way his voice shook. 

“ _Yeah_ , Tova, he’s _twelve_.”

“Coop, I swear to fucking stars, shut the fuck up.” Kaltix could make out a little of their features now that his eyes weren’t aching so bad from the light- the one speaking was a dark-skinned woman with a cloud of springy hair, her expression tense as she looked down at him. There was an older man with pitch black hair and wide, narrow eyes, staring sullenly at them from where he crouched against the wall. Leaning his head back, he could see another man behind him, large and pale, with a shaggy mess of blond hair obscuring his face. “You okay kid? What’s your name?”

His head was throbbing, bad enough to have tears in his eyes, and he scowled to try and make it look like he wasn’t sooking like a bub. “Where am I?” he said instead. “Where’s Ma?”

The woman sighed, rubbing at her face wearily. “You’re in a shipping container, on a freighter,” she said. “Anything more specific than that... I dunno. We’ve been in here a while. What’s your Ma’s name, kid?” 

“I...” He blinked, frowning, and then dashed away the tears with the back of his fist. “I don’t- I don’t know... where is she? Do you know?” 

“Kid, I can’t tell you much if you won’t tell me her name or your name.” 

The giant blond man behind him shifted slightly, and then he felt a hand on the back of his head; he let out a panicked whimper and ducked down, trying to roll out of the reach of the touch. 

“He’s got a lot of blood at the back there,” said a soft voice, different to the other two who had been speaking so far. He had a very gentle voice compared to his appearance. “Looks like he got some kind of head wound. Probably concussed.” 

“Do you think they’ll leave the body in here if he dies?” the other man asked dubiously.

“Coop, I am gonna break your fucking teeth if you don’t lay off-” She very visibly gritted her teeth, closing her eyes as if she was trying to get hold of herself. When she opened her eyes again, she looked like she was trying to be more gentle. “Do you remember your name, kid?” she asked carefully.

He stared at her, miserable panic growing in his gut. “I’m- it’s Kaltix,” he said eventually. 

“Okay Kaltix, I’m Tova, it’s good to meet you.” She hesitated. “Do you remember what happened? How you got here?” 

He scrunched up his face. “I remember... the invasion, and there was a lot of smoke, and fire, and Ma was screaming...” He trailed off, the tears welling in his eyes again. “Do you know where she is?” 

Tova looked at him sympathetically. “What town are you from, Kaltix? Do you remember that?” 

He tried to pull up the name, and all he got was a blank- he could remember the shape of the streets, and the fountain in the town square, but no names. When he tried to concentrate on the faces of the people in town, his schoolmates and his teachers and the woman who ran the sweets store, he couldn’t pull up anything specific. Their faces all sort of blurred together into one indistinct mess. 

Frowning more, he thought about Ma. Ma, his mother, who was... a human woman, who... um... had hair... and eyes, and her name was...

“I don’t know,” he whispered, terrified. “I mean, I _know_ , but it’s like it’s gone, I don’t... I don’t remember.”

Tova sighed. “It’s okay, kid, you got knocked pretty bad on the head- chances are it’ll come back to you in a day or two, once everything stops rattling around in there.”

He scrubbed hard at his eyes, wishing he could stop crying in front of these strangers. “What... what are we doing here?” he asked, glancing around at the cramped space. A shipping container, she’d said. On a freighter. Were they being taken to the capital? 

For a long moment, none of them spoke, and when he looked back at Tova she was deliberately not looking at him. None of them were, he realised, as he looked around at them one by one.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered, hugging his arms to himself. 

“We’re slaves, kid,” the one Tova had called Coop said. “The Empire took us as slaves, so, you know, congratulations.”

“Coop, you are an asshole,” Tova said, making a disgusted sound. She turned back to Kaltix immediately, holding out a hand as if she thought she’d have to calm him. “Hey, it's gonna be okay Kaltix, you hear? It's just a bluff, the Imps can’t take Republic citizens like this, so they’ll either trade us back for other hostages or our boys and girls will rescue us, okay?”

“Slaves?” Kaltix heard himself say the word, but he didn’t know he’d said it. It sounded like it had come from a long way off, said by someone else. “I’m a slave?”

“Just a prisoner for now, Kaltix, it’s alright-”

“Tova, it’s fucking cruel to get the kid’s hopes up like that,” Coop said, scratching ferociously at his neck. “Be fucking honest with him, if nothing else.”

“Just because you’ve given up doesn’t mean I’m going to,” she snapped, her expression softening as she turned back to Kaltix. “It’s gonna be okay, you hear? A few days and we’ll get you back to your Ma.”

There were tears dripping down his cheeks and he tried to scrub them away with his fist. “What... what if I don’t remember her?”

The big blond man sighed softly. “We’ve got time to work it out,” he said quietly. 

______

They did not have time to work it out. 

The Empire lost Alderaan in spectacular fashion, after making an equally spectacular attempt to capture it, and retreated to lick their wounds. The invasion had been excruciatingly expensive, and costs had to be recouped where they could. 

In total, the Empire abducted forty six thousand, three hundred and fourteen Alderaanian citizens, with the intention of using them as leverage or shoring up their own slave stocks. When the true cost of the invasion began to come to light, the Ministry for Logistics made the most sensible, economically viable plan they could in such a situation. 

Namely, they sold all of the captive Alderaanians to the Hutts. 

And the Republic never came to rescue them.

______

This planet, he learned, was called Ylesia. 

He didn’t remember it from any of his school lessons, but to be honest they hadn’t really ever done a lot of astrological politics beyond the most basic. One of the older slaves said they were in Hutt space, and he sort of knew where that was, and that it was a long way from home, but he couldn’t really say where home was from here either. 

Nothing had made him realise how huge the galaxy was faster than being suddenly trapped on an alien world a billion miles from home at least. Or maybe a billion billion. Or a billion billion billion, he didn’t know. He hadn’t paid enough attention to know how big the numbers were supposed to be. 

Given how unlikely it was that he was ever going to see home again, it might as well have been on the other side of the universe. 

He hated it so much- it was hot, and sticky, and there were always bugs buzzing around waiting for an opportunity to bite him. On Alderaan they’d lived a fair way south of the equator, and the summers had been mild and the winters deep and cold, and this unrelenting heat was unbearable. It didn’t really cool down at night, not properly, and you couldn’t sleep with the ragged blanket on because you’d bake- but that meant that the bugs would have free rein to feast on his legs and his arms and leave him covered in welts and rashes come the morning. 

His brand itched too, the skin still red and shiny- the older slaves said it was normal, and that it was probably infected. Someone offered him some tree sap, and it smelled revolting, but they swore it would ease the heat of it; some of the others liked to slather it on their arms and legs each morning, smearing it over the back of their necks as they enthused about how good it was at keeping the bugs at bay. After a few weeks of watching them swat away far less of the swarms than he did, and waking up with far fewer welts in the mornings, he learned it was probably best that he just held his nose and accepted it as a small blessing. 

Ylesia was something of a pleasure location, not that he knew what that meant exactly, and it wasn’t really something he was ever going to experience himself- if there was a better life to be had as a slave in the cities, it wasn’t like it was an option for him. People came to Ylesia to let themselves go, although go from _what_ he didn’t understand; none of the grown ups ever explained it to him, except to say it was lucky he wasn’t working in the spice processing plants. Ma and Pa had used spices in the kitchen, when they’d made dinner, so he didn’t know what was so terrible about a place that made spices. They’d made the food taste better, but the one time he’d said that, the other slaves had laughed at him, and one had ruffled his hair and that annoyed him so much. He _hated_ being laughed at, and treated like a child. 

And besides, working with spices sounded far better than the work they had him doing- namely, worm farming. Ylesia was the native home of the Ylesian White Worm, a creature considered a delicacy by the Hutts, who liked to eat them alive and wriggling. They were easily as long as his arm when fully grown, with some of the bigger specimens as fat around as his wrist; the Hutts ate them in their millions every year, so growing enough of them was a massive undertaking, given that they only seemed to grow well in the soil and swamps of Ylesia itself. Especially the red mud- they loved the red mud, which stained skin and cloth and metal and whatever it happened to come into contact with. 

Kaltix could swim, and he remembered growing up on a farm of some kind- although the particulars of his memories remained frustratingly elusive, as if glimpsed through fogged glass, the details blunted and mute and just slightly out of reach- and so that apparently made him excellent stock for the worm farms. 

There were raised wooden docks that crisscrossed the open spaces in the swamps, and in between each were row after row of carefully cultivated tracts, all stuffed full of worms at different stages of development. It stank, almighty stars did it reek like nothing he’d ever smelled before, and between the stagnant water and the tree sap, he was pretty sure his nose had just up and died within the first six months. 

Growing and farming giant worms was more complicated than he thought it might be- although granted he wasn’t really sure he’d ever had reason to consider the ins and outs of worm farming before. Every morning just before dawn, the control droids would wake them with prods from their electric staves, and they’d trudge out to the docks to their allocated patch. White worms were mostly nocturnal, or at least, they wriggled around a lot more at night, so it was best to feed them just after dark and just before sunup. They liked meat, and blood, and if you went in without wading boots on they had a tendency to get nippy- there were horror stories about more than one slave being mobbed by suddenly ravenous worms and being stripped of all flesh from the thigh down, and some of the older folk would pull off their shoes at night to show off missing toes or circular scars where the mouths had latched on like leeches. 

Each patch was broken up into seven rows, one for each week of the Ylesian month, and the worms rotated through so that there was always a row ready to harvest each week. The droids stood watch up on the docks while they waded up and down their rows, stirring up the mud and pulling them up to measure, checking them for blackrot, pulling up the weeds that would choke them out of the mud and diminish the haul. 

They were all expected to meet a certain haul each week, and if you didn’t make your quota you suffered for it. _Hutts were hungry_ , the foremen would say, _so you’ll go hungry too_. He heard stories about people getting on the wrong side of the foremen, coming out in the mornings and finding their worms floating belly up and bloated with poison, only to have the foremen _tsk_ in false disappointment while reminding them it was only a day until weigh-in for the week. 

And you never ever felt dry, was another thing- between the perpetual sweat and the fact that he spent the better part of each day wading through knee high water in boots that leaked, skin rot was never ever far away. Between his toes was always the worst, itchy peeling skin that cracked whenever he flexed his feet, and some of the slaves got it round the crotch as well; they said it was a fungus, something that thrived in the damp and the moist, but it wasn’t like he cared. It was still gross, and it still made his life unpleasant, he didn’t care what it was doing it. 

Every single day, he woke up at the prod of an electric staff, and every day, he hated the Republic just a little bit more for not coming to get him back. 

______

When he was fifteen, there was a girl. 

They didn’t get much time for socialising, really- the foremen didn’t want them finding time to gather and spread their unhappiness, to talk of revolt and uprising, so they worked them to exhaustion constantly. Meals were mostly silent affairs, eaten as quickly and desperately as possible, so as not to waste a single drop of the slop they fed them. 

The girl- her name was Andi- was from a small moon in the Outer Rim, near the edge of Hutt space. Pirates came in and swept up everyone in their settlement, and she hadn’t seen anyone from home in nearly a year. She had no idea if they were still alive, or where they’d been shipped off to if they were, or if they were all safe and together and thought he dead instead. Kaltix could relate to that, and he envied her for her clearer memories; sometimes things came back to him, usually first thing in the morning when he was groggily clawing his way awake and he’d remember the colour of his mother’s eyes, or the fact that his sister’s nerf doll had been named Pookah. 

That last fact was the most confusing, because out of any of his memories of his life before Ylesia, the ones of his sister were the most vague. He remembered literally nothing of her, and other than the occasional flash of insight into her existence, he would have questioned whether he had a sister or not, or whether he had just desperately wished one into his scattered memories, another part of a family he was losing more of every day. 

He didn’t say this to Andi, of course, because it wasn’t like they got time for that sort of maudlin introspection or soul-searching. Mostly they didn’t get anything more than a minute or two, snatched at the end of the meal-break or as they were walking back to the rudimentary huts they slept in during the brief night rotations. They shared little snippets about their days, like the dragonfly that Andi had seen flitting over the ponds on her end of the farm, its gossamer wings flickering like a rainbow, or the security droid up on the docks near Kaltix’s end of the farm that they’d managed to get a worm stuck in one of the vents on the back panel, resulting in the dumb mech being harassed by birds all afternoon while it batted slowly at them. 

Little things, shared moments that had brought smiles to their faces, snatched pieces of happiness in the face of the overwhelming despair and frustration that came from the endless drudgery of their days. 

In time, in a better place, they might have fallen in love- it could have been something wonderful and gentle, a connection shared between two young people blossoming into something more. But slavery didn’t really allow room for those sorts of feelings, or encourage those sorts of relationships; you took what you could from what privacy you could steal together, and you were thankful for that little bit of normalcy. 

Andi kissed him first, one night on the walk back to the huts- there was a commotion behind them, some kind of lizard banging around in the bins near to the mess tent, and the foremen had been distracted. In the brief window of opportunity they had, she’d turned to him and held his face in her hands, smooshing her lips up against his with clumsy enthusiasm. 

It had been over within seconds, wet and warm and awkward in its abruptness, but it had been _wonderful_. He hadn’t really had proper human contact, affection contact, since he’d been taken into slavery, and being touched so earnestly brought back memories of home, and the sort of easy affection his parents had had for one another. 

He barely slept that night, for all that the nights were far shorter here on Ylesia than his body was able to acclimatise to, and he was grouchy and red-eyed the next day. 

But he couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss, or the way she’d so readily thrown herself into it the moment they had freedom from the guards, and when she sat down on the ground opposite him at meal time later that evening, he smiled across at her and noticed when she bit her lip shyly. 

There were other kisses, and sometimes they carefully held hands while they ate- as long as the foremen weren’t watching- and a couple of weeks later he woke to find her crawling under the threadbare blanket he had over him, her finger pressed to his lips to hush him so as not to wake the other young men who shared the hut with him. 

He didn’t know what he was doing, and neither did she, but between the two of them they managed _something_. It was awkward and messy, and it was very hard to keep quiet, but they managed. After they’d lain together half asleep for a time, she’d kissed his cheek and whispered goodnight, pulling her pants back on before creeping out to find her own hut again. 

Four days later, the foremen announced that the great Bas’amra the Bountiful, the Hutt responsible for overseeing the extensive farms across the southern hemisphere, was looking to make further profits. To that end, every third slave was collected up and ushered onto an off-world freighter, bound for the slave markets in order for some damn slug to make a fucking profit off of their lives. 

Andi was one in three. 

He didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye to her. 

And the next morning, when he got out to his plot, he found it several rows larger than normal. With a third of the workforce suddenly gone, everyone had a lot more ground to cover to make the same quotas by week’s end. 

He put his head down, and he worked in silence, and he hated. 

______

The years dragged on.

He tried to keep track of them, to start with; it was easy enough, what with how strictly they enforced the weekly schedules and the quotas and the shipping dates, but after awhile, it all started to blur together. Maybe it was his memory problems, the way he’d never really recovered properly after that blow to the head all those years ago when he’d been snatched up in the first place. Sometimes he could recall things with perfect clarity, like the burning sting from the one time he’d been unlucky enough to get bitten by one of the damn worms, the perfect circular scar standing out on the back of his hand years later. Other times he couldn’t remember a conversation within minutes of having it, the blank space in his memory frustrating and embarrassing him. 

Sometimes he’d make a comment about something that had happened recently, only for the other slaves to stare at him in bewilderment and point out it had actually happened six months ago. Sometimes they’d bring up something from the previous afternoon, and he’d be utterly mystified as to what they were talking about. 

So he gave up. What was the point, after all? He was a slave, and no one was coming to rescue him, so counting how long he’d been trapped in this moist, hot hellhole was only going to make him feel worse. It was better to just lose himself in the days and the nights, to trudge through it without keeping track. 

New slaves would come through to replace those who died, and he was always convinced that they looked far younger than he’d ever been, that they were bringing them in far younger and far smaller than he’d been when he’d first arrived on Ylesia. They looked so tiny and so frightened, crying quietly at night for lost families they would never see again, and he closed his eyes in bed and convinced himself he couldn’t hear them. No one was coming for them, so it was best not to coddle them; best not to give them false hope. It hurt, but it would be better in the long run. 

Word of the war trickled down to them occasionally, especially when the new batches of slaves came in. It seemed like such a bizarre concept, the war- for the most part, the battles were a long way from Hutt space, so they never had any impact on their lives down on the farms. No one in Pub space or Imp space was looking to buy worms, so the war didn’t change the market for them, or the demand. 

War was something that happened a long, long way away, to other people. 

The greed of Hutts, however, was a constant looming threat that was never too far away. 

He was used to them whittling away at their numbers, cutting the farm back to the absolute minimum it needed to function and then cutting back a little more before accepting the inevitable and sending in some fresh slaves. It was a constant cycle, and one that he had grown to accept would never involve him; for whatever reason, he was never amongst those selected to be sold on to other projects, always left standing in the red mud that stained everything. When he’d first arrived so many years ago, the older slaves would tell them horror stories about how the mud was red from the blood of the unlucky slaves who had succumbed to the worms. 

Now he just had to wonder how quickly it would all be over if he closed his eyes and let himself sink under the muddy water- whether he’d drown first, or whether the worms would get to him while he was still conscious. 

In the end, he didn’t have to find out. 

It was a normal day, with nothing to indicate that anything out of the ordinary was likely to occur; certainly he hadn’t heard any rumblings of unease from the foremen that might have served as a warning for what was about to happen. 

The sound of engines was the first indication that everything was about to change, and around him in the dozens of ponds he could see other slaves hesitating in their work and glancing furtively towards the sky, just like he was. They weren’t due for a supply drop for another week, and it was three days too early for the pickup on the crates of worms. Shielding his eyes against the burning sun, Kaltix squinted as he tracked the movement of two large freighters moving towards the camp at speed. 

That in itself seemed ominous, but when the foremen started shouting too, yelling for the droids to start firing, he knew something was very, very wrong. 

Something squealed loudly, bad enough for most of them to put their hands up to their ears with a wince, and he realised after a moment’s confusion that it was the sound of a loudspeaker. “Congratulations, worms!” came a booming, enthusiastic voice. “Oh, and there’s some actual worms! The generous and benevolent Damra’ssaa the Hutt has taken it upon himself to free you of your life of drudgery, and take you against his bosom-”

“It’s a raid!” someone yelled from nearby, and panic broke out amongst them. 

The foremen tried to keep control, but when the two freighters started returning fire against the droids, there was no hope of staying calm. Everyone started screaming and running in all directions, some of them making for the treeline in the hopes they could vanish into the deeper swamps; he saw more than one person trying to wrestle a blaster away from a droid, clearly hoping to defend themselves against the raiders.

Kaltix, for his part, surged through the water as quickly as his damn boots would allow him, kicking up mud and worms without a care for how many of the fucking things he damaged. Who cared about worms when there was a chance, however slim, that he might be able to get away from all of this? He reached the docks and heaved himself up onto the wooden planks, water sluicing off of him as he crawled up onto his hands and knees, keeping his head down to avoid the blaster fire. 

The foremen’s camp was a little way through the trees, and they had speeders- he wasn’t dumb enough to think he could get away clean, but he could at least nab a bike and try to make it to the city, blend in with the thousands of other slaves and try to disappear from there. 

Maybe he could go home- if he could remember what that was to start with. 

Something slammed into the dock a foot or two in front of him and exploded, and he reeled back with a yelp as something so cold that it burned splattered his skin. Blinking through the tears of pain, he could see something white and vaguely powdery smeared over the wood, steaming in the morning air; it took him a moment to realise that it wasn’t steaming because it was _hot_ , but because it was so excruciatingly cold. 

“Cryo-grenades!” someone yelled in hysterical panic. “Cyro-grenades! They’ve got-”

They were cut off mid word, as one of the grenades slammed into them and exploded, enveloping them in the same powdery mist that had just missed Kaltix. When it cleared, he could see them standing frozen on the dock, their arms still thrown up in terror. 

_The cellar, Kal, get to the cellar, we need to hide in the cellar!_

Yes, he needed to get to the- no, there wasn’t a cellar, that was... that was something else, _somewhere_ else, he needed to... he needed to run, or get someone and-

The blaster fire strafed close to where he was kneeling, and he curled down over his knees to make himself a smaller target, his heart pounding so hard he thought he was going to be sick from it. He’d broken out in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the humidity of the day. 

_Do you have your bag? Where is your sister?_

Something slammed into him, and for a brief moment he felt the most excruciating pain he’d ever felt, and he opened his mouth to scream-

______

-and he stumbled forward onto his knees, bewildered as to why he’d been standing in the first place when he was definitely on the ground a few moments before. 

His breath wheezed from his chest, his heart still beating frantically, and his eyes were blurry and fuzzy; must have been from the cryo-grenade, he must have gotten more of the powder in his eyes than he’d thought, and he-

He froze, a sudden spike of terror surging through him- he was kneeling on something metallic, whereas moments ago he had definitely been crouched on the wooden planks of the docks. His heart was pounding so violently that he felt dizzy and sick, and his eyes were blurred, and somehow within the last few seconds he’d moved from the docks to somewhere else. He was so _frightened_ , the panic building in him to hysteria, and he was panting and shivering and terrified when he heard movement off to his right.

He didn’t even stop to think- he threw his hands up in a defensive gesture, meaning to warn them off, but in his hysteria something else happened instead. Seething, crackling power lurched out of him, a manifestation of his panic, and he screamed as he felt something bright and burning pour out of his fingertips towards the source of the noise. 

Something else- _someone_ else- screamed as well, and then there was silence, Kaltix panting in the grey, formless murk as he tried to work out what in every Corellian hell had just happened. 

“He’s a _sith_ ,” someone whispered from nearby, in a reverential whisper. 

“Who’s there?” he asked shrilly, hugging his arms around him. “Where am I?”

“My lord,” came a second voice, hesitant and accented in a way he didn’t recognise, “you are safe now. We are a salvage team from the destroyer _Vox Imperium_ , sent to-”

“What?” he rasped, wiping furiously at his eyes to try and clear them of the fog that just wouldn’t lift. “From a what?”

Why had they called him a lord?

There was some hesitation before the speaker continued. “My lord, we had no idea that the Hutts had dared to take a Sith Lord prisoner, you can rest assured that the Empire will seek swift and immediate retribution for this insult.”

If he squinted, he could just make out two blurry shapes before him. “I don’t understand,” he said. 

“It’s understandable you would be suffering from some confusion, my lord- according to the records on the bridge, this vessel has been adrift for almost sixteen years now, it’s a wonder the emergency power stores held out for so long.”

Kaltix stilled, the words sinking into his skin. “It’s... what do you mean, sixteen years?”

“You were frozen in carbonite, my Lord- hence the carbon blindness, that should wear off in the next few hours. I have to say, we weren’t expecting to find anything more than slaves in a vessel like this, it is unthinkable to consider that they thought it appropriate to transport a Sith Lord like some sort of common slave.” 

But... he was- he was a common slave, why did they think...? 

“My lord, are you well? We’ve called ahead to the Vox to ready the medical suite for your recovery...”

Kaltix swallowed thickly, his head spinning. “I... I don’t...”

_I need to get home to Alderaan._

He never finished that thought, collapsing face first onto the deck of the abandoned freighter, at the feet of two bewildered Imperial salvage operatives.


	4. Korriban

Bejah was extraordinarily grateful to have Spiro with her over the following days, because she wasn’t entirely sure she would have survived without a friend. 

Going outside was a shock. Going into space was enough to leave her almost catatonic with shock. She’d stared out the windows at the stars, at the infinite blackness, and she’d cried as she’d watched the strange greenish-brown orb she’d called home vanish into the darkness behind them. She didn’t miss the factory so much as she missed the vague concept of safety it represented; in the factory, she knew what was expected of her, and what dangers she faced.

Here, in the company of one of _Them_ , she had no idea what to expect, except that danger was all around her. 

They took her to a planet that was as red as blood, with carved mountains and cliffs and and bleak black halls embedded in the earth. Spiro trotted along patiently at her heels, and she did her best not to cry as they introduced her to a man they called Overseer and he explained her purpose to her with much sneering and mockery. 

She was in tears by the end of the greeting, and he mocked her roundly for that. 

After that, she vaguely remembered a tour of the facilities, of training rooms full of weapons and things that looked built for torture, of an actual proper mess hall where she could smell more food than she’d ever seen in her life, and then to a dormitory that she was to share with other applicants. 

They shoved her through the sliding door, and she froze, terrified beyond measure to find two other people already in the room, both of whom turned towards her at her entrance. 

Her gaze went instinctively to the red-skinned woman standing in the centre of the room, her entire being radiating confidence and haughtiness in a manner that Bejah found as entrancing as it was terrifying. 

The woman narrowed her eyes at her. “Another one,” she said disdainfully. 

She had a stark burn mark on her cheeks, but they didn’t look hideous and warped like her own did; rather, it was just another aspect of her cruel and magnificent beauty, the jagged spikes of her facial ridges and golden jewellery in harmony with the brand. Bejah envied her the ability to make it look so seamlessly empowering, like it was a sign of her power and not an act of violence and abuse stamped upon her body by uncaring masters. “It doesn’t matter,” she said dismissively, waving a hand as if to end the conversation she’d been in the middle of with the other occupant of the room. “Lord Zash will choose me, because I can give her the one thing all _true_ sith desire.”

The opportunity to talk to someone who might be more sympathetic to her ignorance was too hard to pass up- if these people were applicants like her, then surely they were just as untrained as she was. “What does a true sith desire?” she whispered, licking her lips nervously. 

From the other bunk, the young human man snorted in amusement. “She means power,” he drawled. “She thinks she can give Lord Zash power, and that’s why she’s the best candidate. She’s wrong of course, but-”

“I don’t remember asking for your opinion, wretch,” she snapped. 

“If Lord Zash wanted power, she would simply have taken Fonn like the Overseer wanted her to, and that would’ve been the end of it. She’s after something in particular, and I’m going to make sure it’s me.”

“You are untrained and common breeding stock, whereas I have served for years as an assassin and can trace my bloodline back to the arrival of the first Dark Lords on Korriban millennia ago.”

Confused, Bejah glanced between them. “Um, excuse me... miss?” She flinched when the alien woman turned violent gold eyes upon her again. “I don’t... I don’t understand, how are you a slave with a good bloodline?”

On the other side of the room, the young man let out a bark of laughter. 

Flicking an irritated look that verged on homicidal in his direction, the woman turned back to her with a smile full of teeth far too sharp and drilled with more gold again, dots and swirling designs that mirrored those embedded in her face. “Have you been living under a rock, little one?” she asked, the silken gentleness in her tone making Bejah’s skin crawl. “Wherever have you been hiding that you should be so ignorant of the ways of the sith?”

Hesitating for a long moment, and stopping herself from glancing in the direction of the other human for help, Bejah finally whispered “I, um... I worked in a factory. I’d never been outside until... until a few weeks ago.”

“A factory? How quaint!” She got the impression that the woman was mocking her, but she couldn’t be sure. “And now our diligent little worker is a candidate to be an apprentice to a Lord of the Sith, as if the legacy of our forebears means nothing to be sullied so easily.”

“Shut up, Kallathe,” the man snapped, rolling onto his side on the bunk to face them. He turned his attention to Bejah instead. “She is a pompous, arrogant asshole, and you’d do well not to listen to her.”

“What are you talking about, my dear Kaltix, the girl and I are going to be dearest friends.” A red hand tipped with artificial gold claws slid over her shoulder, the familiarity of the gesture making her shudder. “Isn’t that right, darling?”

“What’s her name, Kallathe?”

“Why, Kaltix, I am remarkably distressed that you would think I wouldn’t know-”

“It’s Bejah,” she said quickly, interrupting before they could get their claws into each other anymore than they already had. She cringingly pulled out of Kallathe’s grip and shuffled down the bunk until she was pressed up against the wall, wrapping her arms around her knees. “It’s Bejah, and I come from a factory. They said it was called Raxus Prime, I don’t know if that was the name of the factory or-”

“It’s a planet,” Kaltix said, voice weary but otherwise not cruel.

A planet. Of course, she was on a different planet now, she’d moved between the stars on a ship, just like in mother’s stories. “Oh,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say. “Thank you.”

“What is _that_?” Kallathe asked in a disgusted voice, gesturing to Spiro. “Am I going to get infected from being near it?”

Bejah felt a surge of anger, and the lights in the room flickered once; Kallathe and Kaltix both glanced up at the ceiling, and then over at her. “Interesting,” Kaltix said quietly. 

“What’s interesting?”

“You have a strong influence on electrical systems,” Kallathe said, her voice decidedly more calculating now. “You didn’t even _look_ upset, and the lights responded to you. How did you build the droid?”

Bejah glanced at Spiro, pulling him up onto the bunk with her. “Who’s to say I built it myself?” she asked hesitantly. 

Kallathe made a dismissive noise. “Please, girl, there’s no point being modest. The droid is peculiar at best, and definitely no established model currently in production- and since when do slaves own droids?”

She hugged it to her, taking great comfort in the hum coming from the internal mechanisms. “I just... I wanted a friend,” she said quietly. “So I built one.”

Silence greeted her words, and when she finally risked glancing at them, they both had a calculating look in their eyes. “I have an idea,” Kallathe murmured. 

______

“And you say they worked together?” Lord Zash mused, eyeing the three ragged offerings in front of her with great interest. She’d been ready to guess that the Pureblood girl would be her safest bet, from their earlier meeting several days ago in the hallways of the Academy, but to hear that she’d willingly cooperated with the two much weaker humans...

That was intriguing indeed. 

The Overseer looked like nothing had ever pained him more than to admit it aloud. “Indeed they did, my Lord,” he said from between gritted teeth. “I have threatened them with flogging and confinement in order to shake the truth from them, and they have all given the same story. The human girl dealt with the droids and the traps in the tombs, the Pureblood girl protected them from the madness of the old spirits, and the boy...” His mouth twisted with distaste. “Well, as you can see, the Deshade has apparently bound itself to him in servitude.” 

“Fascinating,” Zash said, taking them in one at a time. The human girl cowered and tried her best not to draw her attention, the Pureblood stood tall and proud, chest thrust out and hip jutting as if in challenge or seduction, and the human boy stood sullen and hunched, the monstrous Deshade looming over him from behind. “An untrained practitioner of mechu-deru, an acolyte to the teachings of the Dread Masters, and a youth with the power to bind a shadow-killer. Most intriguing.” 

“As you say, my Lord Zash,” the Overseer said. “Have you made your decision as to who will be accompanying you?”

Pretending to consider the issue for a moment longer, tapping her chin as she surveyed the three young applicants, she sighed dramatically. “I suppose there’s nothing else for it,” she said ruefully. “I’ll just have to take all three.”

This was clearly not the answer the Overseer had been expecting, if the way his eyes widened and his face reddened was anything to go by. “I- but, my Lord, this is most unheard of, and-”

“Are you questioning my decision, Overseer?” she asked, tutting gently at him. “We all know what happens when you question my decisions.” 

“If you intended to take more than one, there was no need for Fonn to die!” he said angrily, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. 

Zash tilted her head to the side. “Of course there was, my dear Harken, that was to teach you a lesson about presuming to know better than your betters,” she said soothingly. “Do not ever think you can presume to tell me what to do ever again, are we clear?”

He gritted his teeth and looked towards the floor. “Yes, Lord Zash,” he said bitterly. 

“Wonderful,” she said, clapping her hands together in delight. “Then I’ll have all three.”

After all, they were only slaves. If they died in pursuit of her vision, well- she’d just get another. 

It was the perfect solution.


End file.
